SlideWorld: A multidisciplinary research project to reinvent the videoconferencing user experience

SlideWorld is a Bell Labs research project that aims to create a new immersive user experience in the situation of videoconferencing. It addresses two types of user experiences: the remote listener's immersion in the event and the speaker's augmented feedback channel from the remote listeners. Such innovation may leverage technical novelties (such as smile detection) or usage novelties (such as virtual neighbors selected in a crowd). SlideWorld is an example of a successful project that managed to innovate by smoothly integrating technical and usage novelties. To do so, a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, ergonomists, and designers ran several rounds of design, development, and experimentation to define/refine the user experience and its actual implementation. This paper exemplifies this typical multidisciplinary work.