Transcript CSCW + Collaborative Virtual Environments

Collaborative Virtual Environments
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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 Cooperative 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
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Synchronous
Co-located
Voting
Powerpoint
Non-collocated
Phone,
Chatroom
Asynchronous
Notice
board
Email
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):
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Email
Newsgroups/mailing lists
Workflow systems
Hypertext
Group calendars
Collaborative writing systems
Groupware Applications
• Synchronous groupware (Same Time):
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Shared whiteboards
Video communications
Chat systems
Decision support systems
Multi-player games
Collaborative virtual environments
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 • Main application areas
data representations and
to date: military &
work tools and users
industrial team training,
collaborative design &
engineering, and
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multiplayer games
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:
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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
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– increasingly seen as an important concept in collaborative
work
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)
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Shared context
Awareness & Presence
Negotiation & communication
Flexible Viewpoints
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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
Awareness + Presence
• 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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
Awareness + Presence
• 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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
Awareness + Presence
• 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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
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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CSCW/CVE Workspace Design
Flexible Viewpoints
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Moving from a WYSIWIS approach to a
WYSINWIS approach to support roles
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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How do CVE’s Differ From Other
Conferencing Tools?
• 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.
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