The virtual tea room - experiences with a new type of social space

This paper focuses on technical, social and psychological aspects of the use of a video wall for communications between two geographically separated halves of a university department. The overall usability of the system is related to technological limitations such as video and audio quality, and aspects connected with organizational and interpersonal psychology. A video wall creates a new type of "social space", raising new social psychology issues, and requiring new types of interpersonal behaviour. Whilst it has some close parallels with standard desk top video conferencing, it also has some unique and important differences. This paper briefly summarizes those problems and discusses the issues that are shared with other electronic collaboration tools such as desktop video conferencing, followed by a discussion of those issues unique to the video wall. Ongoing trials are being conducted with alterations to audio and video quality, and an analysis is being performed of usage of and responses to the video wall.