Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challenge, especially among strangers. In this paper, we report on an experiment comparing two group-to-group videoconferencing environments and face-to-face communication in their ability to support trust and mutual cooperation in a social dilemma task. There are pronounced differences in participant behaviour between the two video-conferencing designs, indicating higher mutual trust in one of the video-conferencing conditions. The decisive factor seems to be a discrepancy in the type of group identity that develops during the game. Moreover, our results suggest that a combination of personal displays and a unique videostream of each participant present in the better videoconferencing condition contributed to this result.
Abstract. In this paper, we present GColl, a group-to-group videoconferencing environment concept, which aims to provide a natural communication channel even for ad-hoc groups or other teams that require frequent changes in the number of participants or videoconferencing locations. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants while still retaining very modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a notebook with two USB cameras for each user. A working prototype is available for download.
Interactive collaborative environments built upon high quality video applications require minimum capture-todisplay latency to maintain feeling of natural communication. In practice, end users often encounter interruptions due to network congestion, which they could not avoid without knowledge of physical network infrastructure. We solve the problem of application level multipoint routing without assuming accurate knowledge of network link capacities, but rather relying on their estimates by network inference and bandwidth measurement tools. Our approach can handle uncertainties caused by both unreliable bandwidth measurements and unexpected capacity sharing. Support for on-the-fly transcoding of data streams on multicast agents allows per-recipient adaptation of video quality and bandwidth. We have implemented an ant colony optimization algorithm in the CoUniverse middleware for orchestration of collaborative environments. Experiments show very good quality of results on most practical use cases and ability to solve significantly larger instances than optimal approaches based on mixed integer programming.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.