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

TL;DR

This study investigates workspace awareness needs in realistic mixed-presence collaboration on large wall displays, refining existing frameworks to better address user perceptions and requirements in such settings.

Contribution

The paper refines the workspace awareness framework specifically for wall-sized displays, categorizing needs into Environment, Actions, and Attention based on user feedback.

Findings

Refined framework for wall-sized displays

Identification of three key awareness components

Enhanced understanding of user needs in realistic settings

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.