The Brady Bunch, or, Private conversations and peripheral awareness in video teleconferencing

A major impediment to Multipath Video Teleconferencing is the necessity of representing multiple distant users to a single local user. The use of voice-switched video, a traditional solution to this problem, lacks the ability to represent the state of other conference participants to a viewer. This reduces group awareness and introduces undesirable artifacts into the meeting process. To address this problem, a digital video subnet was created to augment a custom voice-activated video switching system. A sophisticated user interface designed around Marking Menus was created, complete with a multipoint communications layer linking distributed sites to relay conversation state information. This system raised user awareness of peripheral meeting activities and empowered users to hold private conversations within a group context. User testing was performed with an adversarial negotiation game, supporting the hypothesis that private conversations and peripheral awareness are integral to distributed group tasks.