Meetings and meeting modeling in smart surroundings

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real-time or off-line. Intelligent real-time and off-line generation requires understanding of what is going on during a meeting. The research reported here takes place in the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects M4 (Multi-Modal Meeting Manager) and AMI (Augmented Multi-party Interaction). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to capture in a multimodal way the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. In these projects many European research groups participate. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etcetera). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear. In this paper we introduce our research aims and ideas and we illustrate them with examples taken from many different projects in related areas.