"Facetop" - A study in collaboration tech

[symphonix]

Stumbled across this blog, which describes a very interesting video and remote-desktop conferencing technique in development on the Mac platform.
They call it "Facetop" and it superimposes a partly transparent webcam image of the users over an image of the desktop, enabling them to point out things as they do them, and so on ...

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/07/01.html#a891

I think its a fascinating idea.

[karavite]

Hey symphonix - actually this kind of thing has been developed in research labs many times over the past 30+ years, but the really cool things are not available commercially - just yet. I studied human computer interaction in grad school and had an entire course on Computer Supported Collaborative Work or CSCW. If you are interested here is a link to other some links to follow up on:

http://www.telekooperation.de/cscw/cscw-links.html

I wish I could find links on similar superimposed video apps like this for you, because they do exist, but I would have to dig out my old course packs and they are simply buried somewhere in the house here!

Perhaps the "seminal" paper on CSCW is "Beyond Being There" by Hollan and Stornetta were they state convincingly that creating apps to replace face to face communication have largely failed, but when you create systems that allow interaction not possible (beyond being there), then you really get into interesting ideas.