Roles of communication media in telework environments

In Japan, the continual rise in the number of people moving to Tokyo is causing various economic and social problems, including high office rents, housing shortages, traffic jams, and obligatory long-distance commuting. To try to curb this concentration in Tokyo, government agencies and private companies have set up projects and research groups to study distributing office space. We have been studying problems associated with communication between distributed offices in telework environments. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics and roles of communication media, based on our experience with distributed software development. First, we introduce our communication systems and analyze moving pictures within the video conferencing system to explore how such information is used. We then discuss the roles of media in remote personal communication. Finally, we propose how to evaluate the feasibility of video conferencing and other multimedia communication systems