The Distributed Virtual Meeting Room Exercise

In this paper, we describe our research on distributed virtual meeting rooms. Starting point is our research on multi-party interaction, where the interaction may take place in real, augmented and virtual environments. Moreover, those that interact may be humans, human-controlled avatars, (semi-) autonomous agents, mobile robots, etc. In this paper the emphasis is on connecting meeting environments and transforming perceived and captured meeting activity into multimedia representations of that activity, including re-generation of activity in virtual reality, and making this re-generation perceivable in different, internet-connected, environments. This re-generation is useful for on-line meeting assistance, remote meeting participation and assistance, and for off-line access to meeting information.