Hypermeeting: Supporting Asynchronous Meetings With Hypervideo

While synchronous meetings are an important part of collaboration, it is not always possible for all stakeholders to meet at the same time. We created the concept of hypermeetings for meetings with asynchronous attendance. Such hypermeetings consist of a chain of video-recorded meetings with hyperlinks for navigating through them. Our HyperMeeting system supports the viewing of prior meetings during a videoconference. Natural viewing behavior such as pausing video generates hyperlinks between previous and current meetings. During playback, automatic link-following guided by playback plans present the relevant content to users. Playback plans take into account the user's meeting attendance and viewing history and match them with features such as topic and speaker segmentation. A user study showed that participants found hyperlinks useful but did not always understand where the links would take them. Experiences from longer-term use and the study results provide a good basis for future system improvements.