Last summer while I was an intern at MSR, I was thinking about this concept. When people are discussing face-to-face, speech is enriched with gestures (more so if you are Italian 🙂 ). Sometimes it happens that gestures depict the physical/geometrical arrangements of the objects being referenced in the discourse.

When this happens, hands moves across a sort of transparent whiteboard hypothetically placed between the speakers. I call this an “airboard”, a communication device that share some feature of a real display. For instance, invisible items can be grabbed from their position in the airboard and moved on other positions or that can be “erased” wiping the hand over the invisible item.

A pretty cool project would be to make these airboards appear with an Augmented Reality technique.

Tags: collaboration tools, interaction design, linguistics, research

Churchill, E. F., Nelson, L., and Sokoler, T. (2005). Tools that tell tales: Bridging context seams by digitally annotating physical artifacts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Smart Object Systems In Conjunction with the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2005), Tokyo, Japan. [pdf]

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The main argument of this paper is that instead of relating notes to a physical place, we should attach them to a physical object. This because the object is meaningful and seamless between the activity in which it is involved and the people that will be part of those activity. The paper reports the main rationale behind the prototype TackTales that augments a physical bullettin board with digital information.

In this paper we describe our method for supporting artifact-centered communication. We elaborate a design space we have been elaborating called Tools That Tell Tales, and describe the TackTales prototype which provides an instance in this design space. We show how paper postings on a community pin board can be augmented to enable conversations around the physical, paper postings. The TackTales prototype uses modified radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to establish the link between paper postings and the online communication, bridging a seam between artifacts and conversation and activity as annotation. We suggest that our approach can be a ubiquitous computing alternative to the design of general-purpose communication devices and propose artifact-centered communication as a meaningful conversational annotation. 

The picture below shows one of the nice example contained in the paper. The car window itself is the communication space, being annotated with a wax marker, with explicit instructions on the collaborative repair process.

Tags: distributed cognition, RFID, ubiquitous computing

Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (2004). The importance of awareness for team cognition in distributed collaboration. In Salas, E., Fiore, S., and Cannon-Bowers, J., editors, eam Cognition: Understanding the Factors that Drives Process and Performance, pages 177–201, Washington. APA Press. [pdf]

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This paper contains a framework for evaluating the impact of awareness of distributed work. The paper is a mine of definitions. The main definition of workspace awareness is the knowledge created through interaction between an agent and its environment-knowing what is going on. Outlouds are running commentaries that people commonly produces alongside their actions. Consequential communication is the mechanism of seeing and hearing other people active in the workspace.

More of interest for my work is the definition of feedthrough: the mechanism of determining a person’s interactions through the sights and sounds of artifacts (Dix et al., 1993). Feedthrough is importantfor direct manipulation. Maybe in the context of my work I should talk about mediated manipulation. Coupling is the degree to which people are working together.

An interesting passage defining the role of deixis and workspace awareness:

The role of workspace awareness in deixis (i.e., where one’s pointing or gesturing action disambiguates conversational references, such as when one says “this one” while pointing to an object), visual evidence and gaze awareness means that the elements of awareness are part of conversational common ground in shared spaces (Clark 1996). This implies that not only do you have to be aware of me to interpret my visual communication, but that I have know what you are aware of as well, so that I can safely make use of the workspace in my communication.

The paper summarizes a previous work (Gutwin and Greenberg, 1999) on the impact of a radarview telepointer on collaborative work at distance. The participants used a minimap.

Bauer, M., Kortuem, G., and Segall, Z. (1999). “Where are you pointing at? ” a study of remote collaboration in a werable videoconference system. In Proceedings of the3rd International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’99), pages 151–158, San Francisco, CA, USA. IEEE. [pdf]

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The results show that by using a reality-augmenting telepointer a remote user can effectively guide and direct a wearable user’s activities. The analysis of verbal communication behavior and pointing gestures clearly indicates that experts overwhelmingly used pointing for guiding workers through physical tasks. While the use of pointing reached 99%, verbal instructions were used considerably less. In more than 20% of all the cases experts did not use verbal instructions at all, but relied on pointing alone instead.

The majority of verbal instructions contained deictic references like ‘here’, ‘over there’, ‘this’, and ‘that’. Because deictic references are mostly used in connection with and in support of gestures, this finding is a strong indication that participants naturally combined pointing gestures with verbal communication, much the same they

do in face-to-face conversations.

Adams, J., Rogers, B., Hayne, S., Mark, G., Nash, J., and Leifter, L. (2005). The effect of a telepointer on student performance and preference. Computers & Education, 44(1):35–51. [pdf]

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the studies involving the use of telepointers. The paper itself demonstrate how the presence of the telepointer in an experimental course improved the students’ recall of the contents thaught. [More]

While the telepointer has been widely accepted in the Computer Supported Collaborative Work community, little work has been done to quantify its effect on performance and perception. We present preliminary results quantifying the telepointer’s effect on knowledge retention and satisfaction in an online collaboration. In experiments, a remote expert communicated with small student groups to explain an online scanning probe microscope (SPM) interface. The expert used two-way audio-video plus a telepointer to describe the interface to half of the participants, and only two-way audio-video (no telepointer) with the other half. The data show that use of a telepointer improved task completion time tenfold and long-term knowledge test performance by 30-40% on specific concepts. The telepointer group was also more likely to rate the online SPM as a substitute for a local SPM and felt the expert was significantly less distant than did the non-telepointer group.

Tags: Computer-Mediated Communication, education, learning technology

Reyes, P. and Tchounikine, P. (2004). Redefining the turn-taking notion in mediated communication of virtual learning communities. Intelligent Tutoring Systems, pages 295–304. [pdf]

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In our research on social interactions taking place in forum-type tools that virtual learning communities use, we have found that the users have the following particular temporal behavior: they answer generally some messages situated in different threads in a very short time period, in a digest-like way. This paper shows this work pattern through a quantitative study and proposes an integration of this work pattern in a Forum-type tool developed for supporting the interactions of virtual learning communities through the creation of a new structure we will name Session. This structure allows the turn-taking of threaded conversations in an orderly fashion to become visible.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Computer-Mediated Communication

This is one of those iMode services that emerges from the FOMA ecology. We are not going to see it soon in Europe. The concept behind is really interesting. showing your position while you chat enriches each message with contextual information. Then the chat participants can phrase their messages in a different way. They do not have to specify lots of details as these are already encoded by the availability of their position.

“iMapFan” is a map service for imode which offers a range of services including a map-based search, car navigation and “I’m here!” emails. Today they launched a new service, “Map Messenger” – a map-based GPS chat application.

Members of the chat are displayed on the map with according to their GPS location and the application has three modes – centre on yourself, centre on the other parties or an automatic mode which zooms in and out of the map to provide the best view of all chat members. It also has an alert function which vibrates when someone on your buddy list is near.

Buxton, W. (1992). Telepresence: integrating shared task and person spaces. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface ’92, pages 123–129, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society. [pdf]

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This paper argues that current research on telepresence is dicotomized between works aiming at establishing consistent shared spaces and those supporting a sense of shared presence. The paper concludes that the integration of these two spaces is important: the smoothness of transitions. There are different cases and we should adapt technology to support this variety.

DiMicco, J. M., Hollenbach, K. J., Pandolfo, A., and Bender, W. (2007). The impact of increased awareness while face-to-face. Human-Computer Interaction, 22(1). [pdf]

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The experimental results presented in this paper demonstrates that a display showing real-time participation levels, imposing a norm of equal participation on a group, causes those at the hightst levels of participation to decrease the amount they speak. Reviewing the turn-taking patterns with a visualization causes those who spoke the least to increase the amount the speak in a subsequent discussion.

This paper presents Second Messenger, a system of dynamic awareness displays that reveal speaker participantion patterns in a face-to-face meetings, increasing indviducals’ awareness of their own and others’ participantion in discussion. Experimental results indicate that these displays influence the amount an individual participates in a discussion and the procerss of information ahsring used during a decision.making task. These findings suggest that awareness applications brings about systematic changes in group communication styles, highlighting the potential for such applications to be designed to improve group interactions.

Microsoft Surface seems to be a fine piece of interactive furniture. What I like of the project is that put together many year of academic research into a corporate-layout.

The name Surface comes from “surface computing,” and Microsoft envisions the coffee-table machine as the first of many such devices. Surface computing uses a blend of wireless protocols, special machine-readable tags and shape recognition to seamlessly merge the real and the virtual world — an idea the Milan team refers to as “blended reality.” The table can be built with a variety of wireless transceivers, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and (eventually) radio frequency identification (RFID) and is designed to sync instantly with any device that touches its surface.

[more on popularmechanics]

What attracted me was the video where they show how the table can be used to interact with maps. The user place some landmarks on the map just by pointing to the relevant parts, then he select some extra items from a side menu that offers contextual information on those points. Finally, he asks to the system to calculate the shortest path between the landmarks. What this scenario is lacking is how surface can support collaboration and particularly remote collaboration.

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Tags: interactive furniture, RFID, ubiquitous computing