1 Collaborative Virtual Environments + Computer Supported Collaborative Work

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Collaborative Virtual Environments +

Computer Supported Collaborative Work

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CSCW & CVE’s

• Definitions: CSCW, CVE• Communication & Virtual Communication• Collaboration & Task Delegation• Peripheral Awareness In Tasks• Community• CVEs vs. Videoconferencing/ Teleconferencing

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Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW)

• Groupware is the technology designed to facilitate the work of groups

• CSCW is the field of study that relates to groupware• CSCW typically studies face-to-face collaborative work

and assesses how to create the same useful phenomena in software

• Groupware is typically categorised along two dimensions:– Synchronous vs. Asynchronous– Colocated vs. non-Colocated

Co-located

Non-co-

llocated

Synchronous Asynchronous

Voting

Powerpoint

Notice

board

Phone,

Chatroom

Email

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Groupware Applications

• We are still quite far from a “grand groupware system” encompassing every type of communication

• Possibilities are constantly evolving, social interactions changing (esp. the last 10-12 yrs: remote working, mobile working)

• Asynchronous groupware (Time Lapse):– Email– Newsgroups/mailing lists– Workflow systems– Hypertext– Group calendars– Collaborative writing systems

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Groupware Applications

• Synchronous groupware (Same Time):– Shared whiteboards– Video communications– Chat systems– Decision support systems– Multi-player games– Collaborative virtual environments

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CSCW: People Before Technology

“In the next fifty years, the increasing importance of designing spaces for human communication and

interaction will lead to expansion in those aspects of computing that are focused on people, rather

than machinery…”

“…much of the most exciting new research and development will not be in traditional areas of

hardware and software but will be aimed at enhancing our ability to understand, analyze, and

create interaction spaces.”

Terry Winograd, Stanford University, 1997

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Collaborative Virtual Environments

• Distributed virtual spaces/places in which people meet and interact with others, agents, & virtual objects.

• Vary greatly in their representational richness and media support

• Most significantly, they represent a shift in interacting with computers in that they provide a space that contains/encompasses data representations and work tools and users

• Main application areas to date: military & industrial team training, collaborative design & engineering, and multiplayer games

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Technologies• High-end systems:

– Augmented Reality projection systems– Tele-immersion rooms– (Full body) motion capture

• Less intrusive input interfaces:– Facial expression/pose estimation (with

or without high contrast feature ‘markers’)

– Hand gesture (data glove vs. pure image processing)

– Speech recognition– Intuitive?

• Voice over IP (VOIP)• Haptic Interfaces

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Communication

• Verbal: – Speech

• Non-Verbal:– Gaze– Facial expression– Gesture– Other body language

• How important are the non-verbal channels for communication?

• How important are they for task co-ordination (i.e. collaboration?)

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Virtual Communication in CVEs• Non-Verbal Communication

– important for conversation & negotiation, particularly during complex collaborative work

– body language (posture, arm movements)– conversational phenomena (e.g. turn taking)– confusion/understanding & other facial

expressions– gaze/glancing

• Physical/Social “Presence”– awareness of others’ activities– social norms: facing, orientation of avatar,

commitment to conversation partner – richer representations of ‘self’ assists

“getting to know one another”

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Virtual Communication in CVEs• How to drive inputs for these mechanisms?

– conscious control doesn’t work (analogy of driving a car)– scriptable gesture “primitives”– semi or fully automatic (AI) production of gaze, body

language etc. – e.g. linguistic and contextual analysis of typed text, or very high level user control only

– motion capture, image processing possibilities: the issue of “two worlds” may be a problem

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Collaboration• Communication vs. Collaboration• Work artifact collaboration

– in “real world” domains, collaborative work involves the interleaving of singular and group activities

– this requires considerable explicit and implicit communication. Collaborators must know what is currently being done and what has been done in context of task goals.

• “What You See Is What I See” (WYSIWIS)– Conversational and action analysis studies of traditional

collaborative work have shown the importance of being able to understand the viewpoints, focuses of attention and of action of collaborators. E.g.: video-link for bicycle repair

• Chance Meetings– The ‘meeting at the photocopier’ principle should be supported

without the requirement for explicit action by the user

• Peripheral awareness / loose collaboration– increasingly seen as an important concept in collaborative

work

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Virtual Work Objects (examples)• Shared whiteboards• Shared info. navigation

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Space, Place and Community• A ‘place’ has inherent within it a notion of the activities that

occur (take place) there• A place contains within it not only the definition of a shared

purpose, but also the evolution of social policies and appropriate virtual objects to support that shared purpose

• Virtual Communities may provide a solution to the problems of isolation that occur with teleworking … they cannot develop without a sense of place, and they must be explicitly fostered in an online context

• Analytical studies of communication in a MUD-based work community (Evard et. al. 2001):– social discussion accounted for over twice the amount of

communication as work related discussion – The patterns of interaction showed that this social communication

provided foundations for the community– This in turn supported the development of effective collaborative

work-related problem-solving

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Advantages of Place..

• Persistent, shared ‘virtual place’ – fosters community, sense of ownership and belonging. This is important to combat the isolation and related problems often suffered by remote workers.

• Persistence of work artifacts also provides a strong sense of situatedness, which has much to do with memory recall and effective work.

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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design

In designing a virtual collaboration space it is important not to slavishly replicate real life as this would be resource heavy

Features To Optimize (4)

• Shared context• Awareness & Presence• Negotiation & communication• Flexible Viewpoints

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Shared Context

• In geographically distributed teams a sense of shared environment or context is a crucial element in supporting productive collaboration.

• A shared context exists in a collaborative team when all members have access to the same information, share the same tools, share the same work processes and also work cultures understandings of collaborative tasks

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Shared Context

• Just like in the everyday world familiar places will in turn lead to shared understandings.

• Shared context can also be described as a shared understanding and knowledge of current activities, past activities and the activities of others.

• Knowledge of the activities of other can help provide context for your own activity

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Awareness + Presence

• Awareness encompasses the idea of knowing about the environment in which you exist; about your surroundings, and also the activities and presence of others (Rowan and Mynatt 2005).

• Dourish and Belloti (1992) regard awareness as having an “understanding of the activities of others which provides you with a context for your own activity”.

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• Churchill and Snowdon (2001) suggest that awareness should not only refer to the intentional awareness of the activities of participants but also of the “peripheral activities outside of the current task context”

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• Presence has been described as the psychological sensation of being there - having a sense of being in the place specified by the virtual environment rather than just seeing images depicting that place

• Presence can be used as an accurate measure of how effective a virtual environment is.

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• In CVEs presence can be categorised as either personal presence or co-presence. Personal presence is regarded as feeling present oneself whereas co-presence is used to describe the feeling of being in the same place as other participants, and also that these participants are real people (Casanueva and Blake 2000).

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Negotiation + Communication

• Negotiation can be described as the art of persuading others to listen to your views and arguments, persuading them to consider your arguments

• In order to negotiate strategies, allocation of tasks and task structure in collaborative work there needs to be a seamless exchange of information between participants in order to cater for group decision making within the team in question.

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Negotiation + Communication

• In CSCW, negotiation of what will serve as mutually acceptable shared knowledge is generally challenging to achieve.

• Synchronous remote interaction between geographically dispersed individuals can be difficult

• Role of communication (Verbal + Non verbal) in negotiating approaches to problems

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Flexible Viewpoints

• Important in role based collaboration• When supporting various different roles in a

shared virtual space, flexible and dynamic viewpoints need to be supported for any collaborator, in order to aid the completion of his task.

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Flexible Viewpoints

• WYSIWIS – What you see is what I see• This approach may not be useful for role based

collaboration• WYSINWIS – What you see is not what I see –

may suit individuals working on individual tasks

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Flexible Viewpoints

Moving from a WYSIWIS approach to a WYSINWIS approach to support roles

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How do CVE’s Differ From Other Conferencing Tools?

• Naively CVEs may be (and were previously) seen as cheap alternatives to video conferencing and teleconferencing

• However, they can be far more effective for dispersed work • Teleconferencing does not provide:

– body language or other spatial cues (gaze direction, spatial presence & direct or peripheral awareness of the activity of participants)

• Videoconferencing:– is not very suitable for highly distributed deployment

• Neither are good at providing a sense of “co-location”:– you can’t place people in relation to one another; – other than knowing that someone is looking at the camera; you

cannot tell what they are looking at (even if they are looking at the camera, who are they focusing on in the remote group of participants?)

– they are weak in terms of shared activity awareness

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• Neither of these established conferencing technologies:– embed the work tools within the environment– provide a mechanism for innovative virtual tools to be

realized.– Provide for a persistent and evolving place

• Modern CSCW theory see these as crucial factors when actual work practices (as opposed to just meetings) are to be carried out at a distance with the support of communications technology.

How do CVE’s Differ From Other Conferencing Tools?

Documents

1 Collaborative Virtual Environments + Computer Supported Collaborative Work