Mutual Awareness in Collocated and Distant Collaborative Tasks Using Shared Interfaces

Abstract

Shared interface allowing several users in co-presence to interact simultaneously on digital data on a single display is an uprising challenge in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Its development is motivated by the advent of large displays such as wall-screens and tabletops. It affords fluid and natural digital interaction without hindering human communication and collaboration. It enables mutual awareness, making participant conscious of each other activities. In this paper, we are interested in Mixed Presence Groupware (MPG), when two or more remote shared interfaces are connected for a distant collaborative session. Our contribution strives to answer to the question: Can the actual technology provide sufficient presence feeling of the remote site to enable efficient collaboration between two distant groups? We propose DigiTable, an experimental platform we hope lessen the gap between collocated and distant interaction. DigiTable is combining a multiuser tactile interactive tabletop, a video-communication system enabling eye-contact with real size distant user visualization and a spatialized sound system for speech transmission. A robust computer vision module for distant users' gesture visualization completes the platform. We discuss first experiments using DigiTable for a collaborative task (mosaic completion) in term of distant mutual awareness. Although Di-giTable does not provide the same presence feeling in distant and or collocated situation, a first and important finding emerges: distance does not hinder efficient collaboration anymore.

Collaborative Immersive Analytics

“…However there are a number of design challenges that need to be addressed. For example it can be challenging to enable co-located and remote users to have the same level of mutual awareness, and there is a need to provide some representation of the remote users into the local users space [98]. For example, video arms [121], as seen in Figure 11, can show where the remote users are reaching into the shared interactive space.…”

From 3d bimanual toward distant collaborative interaction techniques: an awareness issue

“…The audio communication has been proved to be the most important and essential for effective collaboration. Video [39] or haptic [10] channels can also be used. Second, symbolic communication is another way to allow communication between remote users.…”

COMM notation for specifying collaborative and multimodal interactive systems

“…groupware) are multimodal such as the interactive systems described in [3,4,6,12,25,35]. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in the CSCW community for multi-user multimodal interactive systems based on interactive multitouch surfaces [19,22,28,30,31]. Although multi-user multimodal systems are becoming more prevalent, their design is still ad-hoc without properly keeping track of the design process.…”