PING: a Group-to-Individual Distributed Meeting System

Group-to-individual (G2I) distributed meeting is an important but understudied area. Because of the asymmetry between different parties in G2I meetings, it has two unique challenges: l)the remote participant tends to be ignored by the local participants; and 2) the remote participant has inferior audio, video, and data experience than the local participants. To address these issues, in this paper we present PING, a system explicitly designed for G2I distributed meetings that combines recent advances in both hardware, e.g., microphone arrays, remote person stand-in devices, and software, e.g., audio-video processing, to improve users´ G2I meeting experience. We report how PING addresses the above two challenges and its system design and implementation