Meet me in cyberspace

Magic Lounge

Thomas Rist
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
rist@dfki.de

Virtual meeting places constitute a new opportunity for geographically dispersed people to get together and carry out joint activities and collaborative problem solving tasks. The Magic Lounge project aims to develop intelligent communication services for such virtual meeting places, in close collaboration with real communities.

Earlier versions of the Magic Lounge system demonstrated services such as collaborative www browsing and access via a number of heterogeneous communication devices. These versions comprised a set of loosely coupled communication tools — in particular textual chat, web browser and shared white board.

In the second year of the project our main focus of interest moved to the development of a structured memory for audio and text-based conversations which can be queried by newcomers or latecomers who want to know what has happened in a meeting so far. The reason for this shift was that we realised that the availability of a shared conversation-memory will often be critical to multi-party conversational performance, and can therefore significantly facilitate group conversation and collaboration in virtual meeting environments. Such a structured memory of conversation exists neither in available conferencing systems nor in classical text chat. The memory component we are developing records spoken and written utterances but also includes other interaction events, such as the mutual exchange of references to electronic documents, which may be part of the virtual meeting environment.

Our current work focuses, among other things, on the development of interfaces to access the memory content from different points of view and by means of different communication devices. For example, a temporal meeting browser allows users to navigate back and forth through recorded meetings and to inspect individual contributions in a non-linear manner. The fact that we are integrating mobile communication devices, in particular, has assured the project a good position both in the research community and with respect to industrial exploitation. The upcoming generation of mobiles with built-in internet connection will create a high demand for a technology that makes it possible to access existing information sources and applications in a simple way — and that’s one issue we are dealing with in Magic Lounge.

Magic Lounge web site: www.dfki.de/imedia/mlounge/