MixMeet: Effective, lightweight, and flexible multimedia meetings

MixMeet is a web-based collaboration tool designed to support content interaction and extraction for use in both live, synchronous meetings as well as asynchronous group work. MixMeet is a pure web teleconferencing system that supports live keyframe archiving and navigation, content-based markup, and the ability to copy-and-paste content to personal or shared notes.

Field research we conducted revealed that employees utilize a surprisingly diverse but unintegrated set of tools to collaborate and get work done. People will hold meetings in one app while relying on another to share documents, or share some content live during a meeting while using other tools to put together multimedia documents to share later. MixMeet addresses these concerns, allowing users to browse and search the contents of live meetings to retrieve rapidly previously shared content.

We then extended the core MixMeet tool to cover two other scenarios that our field research uncovered. MixMeetWear is an Android-based smartwatch application that extends MixMeet to support workers who are on-the-go. The app shows keyframes from each meeting participant's stream while also streaming meeting audio in real-time, allowing users to listen in on a meeting while also checking shared visual content opportunistically.

Our research showed that collocated meeting participants often want to share content with one another in side conversations, but this content is not available to remote participants nor is it archived for later reference or reuse. This finding inspired us to build MixMeetMate, a mobile application that augments an ongoing conference. Collocated meeting participants can use the app to access and save keyframes and share content locally as well as with remote participants.

Finally, we later extended the core MixMeet system to create ReflectLive, a tool to help improve non-verbal communication in video telehealth scenarios.