Since I haven't used any videochat software, let alone multiway video conferencing system (MVCS), I am not sure if a brief inspiration I had this afternoon is implemented or not.  The inspiration was to enhance the MVCS experience by emulating what movie directors do to help the audience follow conversations in movies.  It's Hollywood meets video conferencing.

This is how I see the system working.  When a person (A) speaks, the view changes to A.  When another person (B) breaks in, the view switches to B, but the view will briefly switch back to (A) several times while B is speaking.  When B finishes, the view switches back to A.  When A doesn't respond immediately, the view switches to show other attendents intelligently.  The intent here is to catch the facial reactions to weave the conversations into a drama so the system remembers the interaction history like who spoke when, in reaction to whom, for how long, etc.  When two people talk at the same time, the screen is divided into two parts to minimize the ping-pong effect.  Questions are also detected and 'the camera' scans the likely 'suspects' for reactions.

Brief overlaying of textual information about the person on the screen commonly seen in detective TV shows should be also useful when participants are not familiar with each other (i.e. community meeting with 1000 attendents).  It's smartly done based on whether it helps the viewer or not.

Lastly and appropriately going overboard, dramatic sounds can be injected either automatically or by participants like sounds of suspense or those funny sounds talkshow DJs like to use (video-smileys?).  Appropriate video clips (i.e. Three Stooges or Groucho Marx) can also be injected similarly by the moderator or attendence.

While I think it is unlikely someone haven't thought of this before, I thought the idea was interesting enough to share, just in case.