Where were we

Abstract

Where Were We" is a prototype system that exploits the capabilities of digital video to allow groups to include recordings of very recent events into real-time activities. The goals of the research are to see how playback-while-recording and random access capabilities might substantially alter the activity of group work, to discover what difficulties arise in using emerging digital multimedia hardware and software facilities for this kind of application, and to further explore how to base novel systems design on necessarily partial and fragmented observations of actual work activity.The implications of this work on systems architecture has been both to inform the design of digital multimedia tools and to suggest different factorings of computation, display, storage, and transmission. The prototype is now stable enough for use in exploratory settings, and we are poised to see how (and verify that) design groups can make use of these "instant replay" facilities in real working situations.