Jonathan H. Kaplan

Open Wonderland: An Extensible Virtual World Architecture

Open Wonderland is a toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds. The system architecture, based entirely on open standards, is highly modular and designed with a focus on extensibility. In this article, the authors articulate design goals related to collaboration, extensibility, and federation and describe the Open Wonderland architecture, including the design of the server, the client, the communications layer, and the extensibility mechanisms. They also discuss the trade-offs made in implementing the architecture.

Porta-person: telepresence for the connected conference room

This paper describes a telepresence device called Porta-Person. This is the first project in a larger initiative known as the Connected Conference Room, which aims to improve the user experience for remote people connected to meetings taking place in conference rooms. The Porta-Person is designed to enhance a sense of social presence for remote meeting participants. It does this by providing a high-fidelity audio connection and a remotely controlled telepresence display with video or animation.

Private communications in public meetings

Out-of-band communication during audio conferences can improve the effectiveness of distributed meetings. It provides a means for people to privately consult with one another, supports breakout sessions, and allows individuals to resolve problems without interrupting the discussion. Conversely, off-topic chat and poorly timed interruptions can degrade meeting effectiveness. We considered these trade-offs in adding a private text chat capability and a novel, multi-channel voice chat feature to the Meeting Central collaboration suite. In this paper, we explain the motivation behind adding these features and then describe our initial implementation, the usability and field testing we conducted, and the changes that we made as a result of that user research.

Improving audio conferencing: are two ears better than one?

In this paper, we describe a range of audio problems that impact the effectiveness of audio conferences and detail the solutions we have devised to address these problems. We conducted an audio quality assessment to determine how differences in quality impact audio clarity, a remote persons experience connecting to a conference room , and social presence. Based on the results of this assessment, we examine the costs and benefits of increasing audio fidelity with respect to the network resources needed to support high-fidelity audio conferencing.