Rendezvous
Rendezvous was a project to develop a Voice-over-IP conference calling system that later became known as IBM Enhanced Audio Conferencing. The work included the development of an Interactive Voice Response system that mined participants’ calendars to create a list of meetings that included the call-in number and passcode (so Rendezvous users only had to remember only a single number and passcode – that of the Rendezvous system – rather than one for each meeting. In addition, users who had their computers at hand could make use of a meeting visualization that showed who was present in the conference call, who was speaking, and provided access to information about each user and a private back channel.
For more information
Contact Jim Christensen or Jeremy Sussman about the system, or Tom Erickson about the studies of the system’s use.
If you’d like to read more, a good place to start is:
Ding, X., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W.A., Levy, S., Christensen, J.E., Sussman, J., Wolf, T.V. and Bennett, W.E. An Empirical Study of the Use of Visually Enhanced VoIP Audio Conferencing: The Case of IEAC. The Proceedings of CHI 2007. New York: ACM Press, 2007.
Other papers about Rendezvous
Kellogg, W. A., Erickson, T., Wolf, T. V., Levy, S., Christensen, J., Bennett, W.E. Leveraging Digital Backchannels to Enhance User Experience in Electronically Mediated Communication. The Proceedings of CSCW ’06. ACM Press.
