togETHer Project

Learning, teaching and researching on a virtual campus and also the collaboration with external research institutes or industry requires new means for a virtual teamwork. However, telephone lines or peer-to-peer videoconferencing is in may cases not sufficient to guarantee an effective, networked collaboration. The proposed project intends to solve these problems within four steps:

1. Retrieving information from the users: Video- and collaborative conferencing systems.
2. "Application Sharing":allows the sharing of local applications over a network (evaluation of products).
3. Two-dimensional "Joint Editing" data conferencing allows synchronous work on common conferencing data (development).
4. Three-dimensional "Joint Editing" Synchronous data conferencing on the basis of three-dimensional objects with means of augmented reality (development).

The applications to be developed (steps three and four) and the evaluation of an "Application Sharing" product consider the results of the user evaluation. The usability of the new systems will tested with user defined scenarios. Furthermore a support on the implementation of the results within ETH is planned. The project is planned to collaborate with the existing ETH-World project "Videoconferencing”. "togETHer” will elaborate applications to test the efficiency of videoconferencing systems and to fulfill the users needs.