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This article introduces the Vconect project. Vconect (Video Communications for Networked Communities) is a collaborative European research and development project dealing with high-quality enriched video as a medium for mass communication within social communities. The technical capabilities where Vconect innovates concern: high quality a/v capture, dynamic a/v composition, network resources optimization and communication orchestration. The project is driven by two main use cases. The first focuses on the integration of live video communication with social networking services. The second focuses on distributed performances, their automatic representation to remote spectators and the support for social interaction around such performances.

Low-cost video conferencing systems have provided an existence proof for the value of video communication in a home setting. At the same time, current systems have a number of fundamental limitations that inhibit more general social interactions among multiple groups of participants. In our work, we describe the development, implementation and evaluation of a domestic video conferencing system that is geared to providing true 'togetherness' among conference par

While advances in commercial video conferencing and social networking are driving more people to communicate using video, it is still difficult to achieve a sense of co-presence - that is to make the technology transparent to its users - when mediating ad hoc interactions between groups of people in different locations. This paper presents an ambitious plan to define and demonstrate a platform for group communication that allows participants to create a robust video communication session that is centred on a shared activity and to which participants can join or leave in an arbitrary manner using an arbitrary device specification on an arbitrary network. We describe two representative applications in which co-presence is not currently well supported. We then explain the key technical capabilities which we believe must be developed in order to build our platform, highlighting how they extend the state of the art in the dynamic control of video communication systems and the configuration of key components within the network. We conclude by explaining how our novel platform will be implemented and evaluated over the next 3 years.

This paper describes a prototype software platform that supports advanced communications services, specifically services enabling effective group-to-group communications with a social purpose, between remote homes. The architecture, the individual components, their interfaces, and the rationale for building the software platform, such as the usage of standard consumer equipment, are described. A specific novel network based capability, called orchestration, is described as are the results of initial user and technical trials and some plans for future work.