Multichat: Persistent, Text-As-You-Type Messaging in a Web Browser for Fluid Multi-Person Interaction and Collaboration

To facilitate face to face conversation between deaf and hearing participants, we created a cross-platform, browser-based, persistent text-as-you-type system that aggregates each individual\´s utterances in revisable personal notes on a user-configurable multi-person workspace in a common web browser. The system increases the fluidity of real time interaction, makes it easier to keep track of an individual\´s contributions over time, and allows users to format their contributions and customize their displays. Because the system affords "full duplex" parallel communication in a web browser, it supports new patterns of interaction and new possibilities for dynamic browser-based visual representations of temporal patterns of communication. Furthermore, the near-real-time-architectures we are exploring seem to open the way to a family of centralized and peer-to-peer persistent conversation applications such as real-time wikis, collaborative web design systems, collaborative web-surfing applications, and an in-class discussion systems.