Socialising through Orchestrated Video Communication

We report on the development of a video communication medium through which groups of people situated in different physical locations can naturally talk to each other, see and hear each other, and engage in social entertaining activities. Participants are free to move within their space and behave in a manner closer to collocated experiences. Essentially, this is implemented as a multi-location, multi-camera, hands-free video conferencing system between groups, with integrated support for entertaining activities. In this paper we focus on automatic orchestration, the reasoning process that applies screen grammar to best support the communication. We present a formal model for representing orchestration rules and discuss initial evaluation results.