Creativity is enhanced by communication and collaboration. Thus, the increasing number of distributed creative tasks requires better support from computer-mediated communication and collaborative tools. In this paper we introduce "Carpeno", a new system for facilitating intuitive face-to-face and remote collaboration on creative tasks.Normally the most popular and efficient way for people to collaborate is face-to-face, sitting around a table. Computer augmented surface environments, in particular interactive table-top environments, are increasingly used to support face-to-face meetings. They help co-located teams to develop new ideas by facilitating the presentation, manipulation, and exchange of shared digital documents displayed on the table-top surface. Users can see each other at the same time as the information they are talking about. In this way the task space and communication space can be brought together in a more natural and intuitive way. The discussion of digital content is redirected from a computer screen, back to a table that people can gather around.In contrast, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) are used to support remote collaboration.They frequently create familiar discussion scenarios for remote interlocutors by utilizing room metaphors. Here, virtual avatars and table metaphors are used, where the participants can get together and communicate with each other in a way that allows behaviour that is as close to faceto-face collaboration as possible.The Carpeno system described here combines table-top interaction with a CVE to support intuitive face-to-face and remote collaboration. This allows for simultaneous co-located and remote collaboration around a common, interactive table.
We introduce different approaches to user interface devices that provide directed tactile feedback to the user's hand. The basic idea is to enhance the user's six degrees of freedom of interaction within virtual or augmented environments by offering an additional three-dimensional tactile feedback as an immediate, directed response from the virtual world. We also describe the prototype systems TactilePointer and TACTool, which utilize vibro-motors, alarm buzzers, and piezo bend elements as actuators in combination with magnetic and optical tracking. The prototypes have been informally tested within collision sensitive virtual environments.
Video-based collaborative virtual environments (CVE) attempt to emulate face-to-face meetings by immersing remote collaborators in a shared 3D virtual setting. To investigate potential advantages of this novel type of collaborative user interfaces for creating a better sense of social presence and affording a more efficient collaborative process we conducted an empirical study in which pairs of users solved a simple task (matching a set of celebrity photos with a set of quotes) using four different media: face-to-face, a standard desktop videoconferencing system (VC), a desktop video-CVE, and a stereo large-screen video-CVE. As expected, results showed that face-to-face provided a significantly stronger sense of social presence than any of the systems, but relatively little differences showed between the systems themselves. However, significant gender effects emerged in an ex-post analysis for the different system types, with females perceiving more social presence when using the standard video conferencing environment and less with the video-CVE conditions, while males showed the opposite effect. Linguistic analysis of audio transcriptions and video analysis further illuminates differences between collaboration styles of males and females across the collaborative conditions. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies into CVEs and video conferencing systems.
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