Negative Space: Workspace Awareness in 3D Face-to-Face Remote Collaboration
This addresses a specific issue in remote collaboration for users working with 3D content, presenting an incremental design improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of decreased awareness in 3D face-to-face remote collaboration due to opposing viewpoints, and found through a user evaluation that workspace consistency offers more benefits than high-fidelity people representation.
Face-to-face telepresence promotes the sense of "being there" and can improve collaboration by allowing immediate understanding of remote people's nonverbal cues. Several approaches successfully explored interactions with 2D content using a see-through whiteboard metaphor. However, with 3D content, there is a decrease in awareness due to ambiguities originated by participants' opposing points-of-view. In this paper, we investigate how people and content should be presented for discussing 3D renderings within face-to-face collaborative sessions. To this end, we performed a user evaluation to compare four different conditions, in which we varied reflections of both workspace and remote people representation. Results suggest potentially more benefits to remote collaboration from workspace consistency rather than people's representation fidelity. We contribute a novel design space, the Negative Space, for remote face-to-face collaboration focusing on 3D content.