CSSE Virtual Tea Room

Imagine two conventional tea rooms, separated only by a sheet of glass. Staff can sit on either side of the glass, perhaps clustered around a coffee table, and interact. They might be aware that their colleagues on the other side of the glass are not in the same room, because the glass causes some artifacts to appear, the audio might be attenuated, but they are also able to have a reasonable level of interaction in spite of the barriers. This is the goal of the Virtual Tea Room. Our Virtual Tea Room uses two MPEG-2 CODECS from FVC.COM. These are connected to the University ATM network at 155 Mbps.
	Come on a video tour of the Virtual Tea Room
The same infrastructure supports our distributed seminars program.
	Tele-teaching in CSSE using the distributed seminar room

Some Press Releases

• "The Australian", 10/11/98
• "The Australian", 3/11/99
• "The Age", 26/10/99
• "Monash Memo", 24/3/99

Publications

• Giles, S. and Abramson, D. "The Virtual Tea Room: Integrating Video into Everyday Life", International Wireless and Telecommunications Symposium, Malaysia, 17-21st May, 1999. Abstract and PostScript Available
• Giles, S. and Abramson, D. "The Video Wall Project - Video Technology at the Leading Edge in Education", Learning Technologies '99, 20 - 23 October, Noosa, Queensland. PostScript Available
• Gedge, R. and Abramson, D. “The Virtual Tea Room - experiences with a new type of social space”, to appear, 7th International Workshop on Groupware, 6-8 September 2001, Darmstadt, Germany. (Abstract) (PDF)

Seminars

• Introducing the Virtual Tea and Seminar rooms, HEPCIT Presentation, April, 2001.