Desktop conversations — the future of multimedia conferencing

Both the recent explosion of interest in the Internet and the ongoing development of video-on-demand services have focused attention on the retrieval and delivery aspects of telecommunications networks. Yet the telephony network is fundamentally based on a much more basic human need — two-way communication. In fact, people normally communicate using conversation — interactive speech plus additional information in the form of non-verbal cues like body language.The underlying technologies and standards to enable the easy exchange of information in a conversational way are now converging — which brings together the fields of conferencing, multimedia, and telephony into a unified whole. This could well be the catalyst to turning data communications into the dominant conversational medium of the future.This paper looks at the ways that the desktop may soon rival the telephone as the natural route for carrying out a media-rich conversation with a remotely located person, and focuses on one example of a desktop conferencing application — Passepartout.