Automatic orchestration of video streams to enhance group communication

Unlike legacy video-conferencing, which connects two nodes each equipped with a camera, recent systems facilitating for video-mediated group communication deal simultaneously with a large number of video streams. This highlights the need for orchestration,, i.e. the intelligent selection of the most adequate camera views to be displayed on each screen. In this paper we present the initial results of a study that evaluates the effects of orchestration on communication within a specific context; that of two remote groups playing a collaborative board game. The results of the experiment indicate that automatic orchestration can provide improvements similar to the ones achieved when live video mixing is performed by human editors.