Multimedia and multi-party desktop conference system (MERMAID) as groupware platform

Describes a multimedia and multi-party desktop conference system called MERMAID (Multimedia Environment for Remote Multiple-Attendee Interactive Decision-making) which was developed as a groupware platform through the effective integration of computer and communication technologies. It allows a group of widely-dispersed users to conduct a meeting from their desktop workstations or personal computers. Participants can jointly view and process the multimedia information (including text, graphics, images and handwriting) they are sharing, and they can simultaneously interchange voice and video. Thus, they can make a presentation and hold a discussion while interactively interchanging full media information in real-time. This system has already been used for daily research work, such as remote technical discussions, distributed software development, cooperative remote simulations, joint system design, joint document editing, etc., for more than 5 years. This paper first introduces MERMAID´s functionalities and applications, and then provides some user experiences and evaluation results