Negative Space: Workspace Awareness in 3D Face-to-Face Remote Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper explores how workspace and remote person representations affect 3D content collaboration in face-to-face telepresence, proposing the Negative Space design space to improve awareness and interaction.

Contribution

It introduces the Negative Space design space for 3D remote collaboration and evaluates different workspace and representation conditions to enhance awareness.

Findings

Workspace consistency benefits remote collaboration more than representation fidelity.

Four different presentation conditions were compared in user evaluations.

Results highlight the importance of workspace design in 3D face-to-face remote collaboration.

Abstract

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.