Enhancing personal communications with multimedia

Despite recent technical advances in traditional, wireless, and Internet-based communications systems, current technology does not yet efficiently support multimedia features such as real-time streaming video and video-clip swapping. In addition, existing systems do not effectively incorporate the abstractions and emotions that characterize everyday, natural interactions. To address these deficiencies, we propose a cost-effective system that incorporates multimedia information derived from the communicating parties´ shared knowledge and experience without demanding high transmission bandwidth. The system exploits locally stored data about the participants´ relationship as well as user-defined control parameters, current circumstances, and personal attributes such as mood and physical appearance.