Video as a technology for informal communication

Abstract

The intent of this article is not to describe our total research program nor to discuss the evolution of the systems we have built. Rather, we will examine in detail a single attempt to use video telephony for the type of informal communication that is common among people who we physically colocated. It presents a" evaluation of a desktop video telephony system deployed in 1990. While our recent video telephony prototypes have improved on this early system, revisiting it is informative for two reasons. First, the evaluation points to some of the challenges one faces in designing communication technology to mimic social processes that appear to be trivially easy to accomplish in daily life. Second, the approach we adopted demonstrates some of the benefits and limitations of theoretically motivated system design and empirically based evaluation, in contrast to the less disciplined "build it and try it" approach of much human-computer system design. Thus, one can consider the evaluation we report here as a case study both in using video for spontaneous conversation and in applying social science theory and method to the tasks of system design and evaluation.