Synchronous interaction for supporting remote multilingual brainstorming

The motivation of our research is the design and the implementation of tools supporting the activities of several distant teams that have to collaborate for defining the specifications of a project. The paper presents the design of synchronous brainstorming activities between two distant teams mediated by two channels: a TV channel and a resource channel. Via the TV channel, cameras film a team during a session and computer applications allow to record and transmit video sequences to the distant team. During sessions, each team interacts with a large multi-touch device and manipulate virtual post-it notes displayed on both surfaces. Via the resource channel, displays each device are synchronized. The paper also presents the architecture of the main system involving several tactile devices, individual devices like tablet pcs and collaborative ones like interactive tables or whiteboards. The experiment conducted between two team situated in Japan and in France and conclusions about this experiment are described in the last sections.