Tang, John C. and Monica Rua, "Montage: Providing Teleproximity for Distributed Groups", Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI) `94, Boston, MA, April 1994, pp. 37-43.
(c) 1994 Association for Computing Machinery Note: This is a digitized copy derived from an ACM copyrighted
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Montage is a research prototype that explores using video to help collaborators
find opportune times to interact with each other. Physical proximity with
colleagues affords walking down hallways and peeking into offices in order to
find a good time to contact someone. By helping members of distributed work
groups more naturally find opportunities to interact with each other, Montage
aims to provide a sense of teleproximity. Montage uses momentary, reciprocal
glances among networked workstations to make it easy to peek into someone's
office. From a Montage glance, users can quickly start a full-featured desktop
video conference. If the glance shows that the person is not in her office,
Montage provides quick access to browse her on-line calendar, send her e-mail,
or send her an electronic note that pops up on her screen. Preliminary usage
data show that users had short, lightweight interactions through Montage,
although most glances did not result in an interactive communication.
Keywords: Awareness, remote collaboration, media spaces, video,
computer-supported cooperative work.