Workspace Awareness Needs in Mixed-Presence Collaboration on Wall-Sized Displays

TL;DR

A focus group, centred around users' perceptions while testing a mixed-presence scenario on wall-sized displays, leads to a refinement of the original framework for wall-sized displays and in particular to a categorization into three types of workspace awareness components.

Abstract

To enhance workspace awareness for mixed-presence meetings with large displays, previous work propose digital cues to share gestures, gaze, or entire postures. While such cues were demonstrated useful in horizontal or smaller workspaces, efforts have focused on isolated elements in controlled settings. It is unknown what needs would emerge with a more realistic setting and how they could be addressed with workspace awareness cues. In this paper, we report on the results of a focus group, centred around users' perceptions while testing a mixed-presence scenario on wall-sized displays. We analyse the gathered comments using Gutwin and Greenberg's workspace awareness framework to identify the most relevant needs. Our results lead to a refinement of the original framework for wall-sized displays and in particular to a categorization into three types of workspace awareness components (i) the Environment, (ii) Actions and (iii) Attention.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Both locations of the mixed-presence collaboration setup used for the user study. On the left, the Immersive Arena. On the right, the flat wall-sized display. The yellow dotted line shows the remote video feed; the green solid line and the arrow show the local video feed.