DESK-TOP CONVERSATIONS - THE FUTURE OF MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING

Both the recent explosion on interest in the Internet and the ongoing development of video-on-demand services have focused attention on the retrieval and delivery aspects of telecommunications networks. Yet the telephony network is fundamentally based on a much more basic human n eed - two-way communication. In fact, people normally communicate usin g conversation - interactive speech plus additional information in the form of non-verbal cues like body language. The underlying technologi es and standards to enable the easy exchange of information in a conve rsational way are now converging - which brings together the fields of conferencing, multimedia, and telephony into a unified whole. This co uld well be the catalyst to turing data communications into the domina nt conversational medium of the future. This paper looks at the ways t hat the desktop may soon rival the telephone as the natural route for carrying out a media-rich conversation with a remotely located person, and focuses on one example of a desktop conferencing application - Pa ssepartout.