Multichat: Persistent, Text-As-You-Type Messaging in a Web Browser for Fluid Multi-Person Interaction and Collaboration

To facilitate face to face conversation between deaf and hearing participants, we created a cross-platform, browser-based, persistent text-as-you-type system that aggregates each individual's utterances in revisable personal notes on a user-configurable multi-person workspace in a common web browser. The system increases the fluidity of real time interaction, makes it easier to keep track of an individual's contributions over time, and allows users to format their contributions and customize their displays. Because the system affords "full duplex" parallel communication in a web browser, it supports new patterns of interaction and new possibilities for dynamic browser-based visual representations of temporal patterns of communication. Furthermore, the near-real-time-architectures we are exploring seem to open the way to a family of centralized and peer-to-peer persistent conversation applications such as real-time wikis, collaborative web design systems, collaborative web-surfing applications, and an in-class discussion systems.