Video communication for networked communities: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

While advances in commercial video conferencing and social networking are driving more people to communicate using video, it is still difficult to achieve a sense of co-presence - that is to make the technology transparent to its users - when mediating ad hoc interactions between groups of people in different locations. This paper presents an ambitious plan to define and demonstrate a platform for group communication that allows participants to create a robust video communication session that is centred on a shared activity and to which participants can join or leave in an arbitrary manner using an arbitrary device specification on an arbitrary network. We describe two representative applications in which co-presence is not currently well supported. We then explain the key technical capabilities which we believe must be developed in order to build our platform, highlighting how they extend the state of the art in the dynamic control of video communication systems and th e configuration of key components within the network. We conclude by explaining how our novel platform will be implemented and evaluated over the next 3 years

Co-creation Stage: a Web-based Tool for Collaborative and Participatory Co-located Art Performances

“…[2] describes a pilot test on the sense of presence and quality of the interaction Networked Music Performance. [8] presents a platform for group communication that allows participants to create video communication session centred on a shared activity. Finally, [4] presents a script-based approach that provides multi-camera telepresence for distributed theatre.…”

Faces in the Clouds: Long-Duration, Multi-User, Cloud-Assisted Video Conferencing

“…The implementation of a multi-server cloud-based video conferencing system that can dynamically switch streams between cloud server locations with minimal impact on QoE is discussed in the next section. We base our model on the Vconect project [28], which has developed orchestration [29] and composition [17] functions for real-time highquality audio-video communications between ad-hoc groups of people, and implements all four of the above features. The lightweight, dynamic nature of this video router goes beyond what is currently offered by conventional commercial video conferencing systems, and provides a basis for the modelling and simulation of multi-server architectures, as described here.…”

A Distributed Theatre Experiment with Shakespeare

“…The video communication platform developed by the Vconect project [5] to address the challenge of supporting complex use cases for multimedia communication between ad hoc groups incorporates three innovations over state-of-the-art video communication systems:…”