ABSTRACT
The possibility of hearing and at the same time seeing one or more persons at a remote location has been available for quite some time now. For example, the German Reichspost operated a public “Bildfernsprechdienst” (picture-phone service) between Berlin and Leipzig/Munich from 1936 to 1940. In 1964, the first commercial videoconferencing system (AT&T’s “Picturephone”) was introduced at the World Fair in New York City (Hart, Svenning, & Ruchinskas, 1995; Reuter, 1990). Since those early days, several new generations of videoconferencing equipment have been introduced that allow for meetings to be conducted via a two-way audiovisual connection between at least two physically separated sites. However, videoconferencing today is still a somewhat unfamiliar way of conducting business; for most people, it is a rather less familiar form of communication compared to, for example, using e-mail.
