Anthony Tang

Matthew Brehmer, Maxime Cordeil, Christophe Hurter et al.

We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

Gun Woo Warren Park, Anthony Tang, Fanny Chevalier

In remote video meetings, visual non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions or head movements, are seen continuously but often only partially. This increases ambiguity compared to in-person settings and can cause misinterpretation or misalignment between intended and perceived meaning. Motivated by communication theories, we designed FaceValue, a technology probe that augments the self-view with private, real-time overlays. These overlays are subtle, suggestive prompts intended to help attendees reflect on how their cues might be interpreted by others. To invite personal interpretation, FaceValue avoids behavioral labeling and instead aims to support meaning-oriented self-awareness: recognizing when visible cues may unintentionally (mis)communicate intent. We deployed FaceValue in the wild with thirteen knowledge workers over multiple weeks, capturing perceived changes in self-awareness and behavior, and impressions on the design concepts, as self-reported by participants through diary entries and exit interviews. Participants felt FaceValue increased their awareness of potentially misaligned cues and motivated in-meeting adjustments, which they believe resulted in improved communication with other attendees. We contribute a conceptual framing that positions visual non-verbal cues as a manipulable communication resource, a technology probe that aims to foster meaning-oriented self-awareness, and empirically-grounded design insights for future meeting systems.

Karthik Mahadevan, Maurício Sousa, Anthony Tang et al.

In ad-hoc human-robot collaboration (HRC), humans and robots work on a task without pre-planning the robot's actions prior to execution; instead, task allocation occurs in real-time. However, prior research has largely focused on task allocations that are pre-planned - there has not been a comprehensive exploration or evaluation of techniques where task allocation is adjusted in real-time. Inspired by HCI research on territoriality and proxemics, we propose a design space of novel task allocation techniques including both explicit techniques, where the user maintains agency, and implicit techniques, where the efficiency of automation can be leveraged. The techniques were implemented and evaluated using a tabletop HRC simulation in VR. A 16-participant study, which presented variations of a collaborative block stacking task, showed that implicit techniques enable efficient task completion and task parallelization, and should be augmented with explicit mechanisms to provide users with fine-grained control.

Bon Adriel Aseniero, Charles Perin, Wesley Willett et al.

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log, and reflect on their self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, facilitate comparison of goals and achievements, engage viewers with delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable flexible planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach's strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using a role-playing method. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed that they were able to assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.

Martin Feick, Scott Bateman, Anthony Tang et al.

Exploring and manipulating complex virtual objects is challenging due to limitations of conventional controllers and free-hand interaction techniques. We present the TanGi toolkit which enables novices to rapidly build physical proxy objects using Composable Shape Primitives. TanGi also provides Manipulators allowing users to build objects including movable parts, making them suitable for rich object exploration and manipulation in VR. With a set of different use cases and applications we show the capabilities of the TanGi toolkit, and evaluate its use. In a study with 16 participants, we demonstrate that novices can quickly build physical proxy objects using the Composable Shape Primitives, and explore how different levels of object embodiment affect virtual object exploration. In a second study with 12 participants we evaluate TanGi's Manipulators, and investigate the effectiveness of embodied interaction. Findings from this study show that TanGi's proxies outperform traditional controllers, and were generally favored by participants.