With the advent of ISDN, practical wide area multimedia conferencing has become possible at reasonable costs. One such prototype system is the CAR multimedia conferencing system. (CAR stands for 'CAD/CAM for the Automotive industry under the RACE programme'). This system is aimed at assisting distributed collaborative design in the automotive industry. It runs over basic rate ISDN lines or Internet protocol packet networks, with video and audio either provided by integrated video switching and ISDN video codecs, or at lower quality, by software running on the workstation.