BubbleVideo: Supporting Small Group Interactions in Online Conferences

Increasing use of online conferencing systems, particularly over the past year, has highlighted problems in these systems, especially their poor support for small group interactions within larger meetings. These include clumsy small group formation (e.g., issues around joining and leaving existing groups), the difficulty of getting the correct level of audio isolation between groups, poor provision for shared editing of documents, as well as fatiguing aspects of video conferencing caused by presentation format and the necessity of remaining on camera view. This paper describes the motivation, design and implementation of a prototype online conferencing system, called BubbleVideo. Building on both virtual world and pure video paradigms, it implements an extensive 2D world with shared documents, in which users appear through real-time video, presented in “bubbles” that can be moved around. Users are given the possibility of deciding whether to join a group by viewing a conversation “leakage”, which group members can share with outsiders.