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This paper presents a confederation of tools, called Coral, that combine to support the real-time capture of and subsequent access to informal collaborative activities. The tools provide the means to initiate digital multimedia recordings, a variety of methods to index those recordings, and ways to retrieve the indexed material in other settings. The current system emerged from a convergence of the WhereWereWe multimedia work, the Tivoli LiveBoard application, and the Inter-Language Unification distributed-object programming infrastructure. We are working with a specific user community and application domain, which has helped us shape a particular, demonstrably useful, configuration of tools and to get extensive real-world experience with them. This domain involves frequent discussion and decision-making meetings and later access of the captured records of those meetings to produce accurate documentation. Several aspects of Coral--the application tools, the architecture of the confederation, and the multimedia infrastructure--are described.

This paper describes VideoDraw, a shared drawing tool, and the process by which it is being designed and developed. VideoDraw is a prototype, videobased, tool that provides a shared "virtual sketchbook" among two or more collaborators.It not only allows the collaborators to see each others' drawings, but also conveys the accompanying hand gestures and the process of creating and using those drawings. Its design stems from studying how people collaborate using shared drawing spaces. Design implications raised by those studies were embodied in a prototype, which was in turn observed in use situations. Continued research studying the use of VideoDraw (in comparison with other collaborative media) will lead to a better understanding of collaborative drawing activity and inform the continued technical development of VideoDraw.

Abstract-This paper presents an automatic system for analyzing and annotating video sequences of technical talks. Our method uses a robust motion estimation technique to detect key frames and segment the video sequence into subsequences containing a single overhead slide. The subsequences are stabilized to remove motion that occurs when the speaker adjusts their slides. Any changes remaining between frames in the stabilized sequences may be due to speaker gestures such as pointing or writing, and we use active contours to automatically track these potential gestures. Given the constrained domain, we define a simple set of actions that can be recognized based on the active contour shape and motion. The recognized actions provide an annotation of the sequence that can be used to access a condensed version of the talk from a Web page.

Careful observation of small-group design sessions suggests that the process of creating, referring to, and using drawings may be as important to the design process as the drawings themselves. Based on studies of the uses of drawing spaces, Commune was developed to allow designers working remotely to share a drawing surface and to engage in many of the interactions available in conventional faceto-face situations. The design of Commune makes marks and 2-dimensional cursor gestures visible simultaneously to all users, allows rapid transitions among drawing, writing, and gesturing, and provides a shared space with actions from multiple users occurring simultaneously. These capabilities support natural uses of the drawing surface during the interaction: the ability to interact on each other's marks. to emphasize talk with marks and gestures, to reference previous illustrations and concepts, and to interweave talk and drawing actioris fluidly.