2004 Asia Broadband Symposium on Digital City Collaboration

2004 Asia Broadband Symposium on Digital City Collaboration

Intercultural Tele-conferencing System for Digital City

Jun Munemori

Professor, Department of Design and Information Sciences, Wakayama University, Japan

Multilingual environment will be important for tele-conferencing systems. The Intercultural Tele-conferencing System (RemoteWadaman III) have been used to discuss about Digital City between Japan and China. We have tried to discuss by their mother tongue. The trial seemed to be very difficult. But we confirmed that RemoteWadaman III would be able to do it. We have developed and studied tele-conferencing systems about 15 years. RemoteWadaman III is the 3^rd generation of our tele-conferencing system. We developed many functions for the system, for examples, multimedia communication (audio and video), translated chats with pictograph, 2 shared screen (Japanese PPT files and corresponding Chinese PPT files), many shared cursors, a temporal drawing function, a shared white board. We carried out experiences 8 Times. The results of experiment show below. 1) Participants understood the contents of the presentation at least 60% or more. 2) The effect of the multimedia communication (audio and video) was explicit.

Jun Munemori is a professor of Department of Design and Information Sciences, Wakayama University. He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering　from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan, the D.E. degree in electrical and electrical communication engineering from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1979, 1981, and 1984, respectively. He worked in Mitsubishi Electric Corp.,　Kagoshima University, and Osaka University. His interests are groupware, human interface, and neurophysiology. He received IPSJ SIG Research Award, IPSJ Best Paper Award, IEEE CE Japan Chapter Young Best Paper Award, in 1997, 1999, and 2002, respectively. He was a conference vice chair of APCHI’98. He is an advisory board of KES Journal (International Journal of Knowledge-based Intelligent Engineering Systems). He is a member of IEEE, ACM, IPSJ and IEICE. Contact him at munemori@sys.wakayama-u.ac.jp. His homepages is http://www.wakayama-u.ac.jp/~munemori/ or http://www.sys.wakayama-u.ac.jp/souran/munemori.html.