The Impact of Display System and Embodiment on Closely Coupled Collaboration Between Remote Users

Abstract

Trends towards greater collaboration between organisations increase the need for effective, efficient and safe ways to collaborate within distance teams. Technology has already greatly reduced the need for face-to-face meetings. Telephones, text messaging, email, web, and classical video conferencing have all thrived in supporting specific aspects of tele-working. There is, however, still a need for face-to-face meetings, even though the cost to business individuals and the environment can be significant. The holy grail of tele-collaboration is to support the full range of communication used within a co-located group. Psychologists categorise social communication between humans as verbal, non-verbal, the role of objects and that of the environment [1]. Immersive displays surround the senses within an information world, which, compared to desktop systems, is believed by some to increase feeling of presence and by others to increase task performance. Immersive Collaborative Virtual Environments (ICVE) allow a number of people to share an interactive synthetic experience from a true first person perspective. The use of those technologies in tele-immersion allows geographically separated people to interact using a variety of verbal and non-verbal communication within a shared meaningful environment and through shared information objects. We believe that this is the first technology to support these four primary categories of social human communication in a natural and intuitive way. Linking walk-in displays, such as CAVEs, supports unprecedented naturalness of communication between physically remote people by placing them together in a shared scene in which they can naturally move around, talk, gesture and manipulate shared objects. We have investigated the impact of display device and embodiment on the perception and performance of collaboration during a shared task requiring various forms of social human communication and ways of sharing objects. The task, building a garden gazebo, has been routinely evaluated in sustained trials between as many as four linked interactants, distributed between four sites in the UK and Austria.