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4.2 Social mechanisms in communication and collaboration 1 15 I

1
e of the earliest technological innovations (besides the telephone and telegraph) devel-
ed for supporting conversations at a distance was the videophone. Despite numerous at-
tempts by the various phone companies to introduce them over the last 50 years (see Figure
4.4), they have failed each time. Why do you think this is so? 1

Comment One of the biggest problems with commercial videophones is that the bandwidth is too low, 1
resulting in poor resolution and slow refresh rate. The net effect is the display of unaccept-
able images: the person in the picture appears to move in sudden jerks; shadows are left be-
hind when a speaker moves, and it is difficult to read lips or establish eye contact. There is
also the social acceptability issue of whether people want to look at pocket-sized images of
each other when talking. Sometimes you don't want people to see what state you are in or
where you are.

Another innovation has been to develop systems that allow people to com-
municate and interact with each other in ways not possible in the physical world.
Rather than try to imitate or facilitate face to face communication (like the
above systems), designers have tried to develop new kinds of interactions. For ex-
ample, ClearBoard was developed to enable facial expressions of participants to
be made visible to others by using a transparent board that showed their face to
the others (Ishii et al., 1993). HyperMirror was designed to provide an environ-
ment in which the participants could feel they were in the same virtual place even

Figure 4.4 (a) One of British Telecom's early videophones and (b) a recent mobile "visual-
phone" developed in Japan.