SlideWorld, a pluridisciplinary research project to reinvent the videoconference 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 auditors' immersion in the event and the speaker's augmented feedback channel from the remote auditors. Such innovation may leverage on technical novelties (smile detection...) or usage novelties (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-experimentation to define/refine the user experience and its actual implementation. This paper exemplifies this typical multidisciplinary work.