Improving recognition and characterization in groupware with rich embodiments

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Abstract

Embodiments are visual representations of people in a groupware system. Embodiments convey awareness information such as presence, location, and movement -- but they provide far less information than what is available from a real body in a face-to-face setting. As a result, it is often difficult to recognize and characterize other people in a groupware system without extensive communication. To address this problem, information-rich embodiments use ideas from multivariate information visualization to maximize the amount of information that is represented about a person. To investigate the feasibility of rich embodiment and their effects on group interaction, we carried out three studies. The first shows that users are able to recall and interpret a large set of variables that are graphically encoded on an embodiment. The second and third studies demonstrated rich embodiments in two groupware systems -- a multiplayer game and a drawing application -- and showed that the enhanced representations do improve recognition and characterization, and that they can enrich interaction in a variety of ways.

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Publisher Link

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240627

Citation

Tadeusz Stach, Carl Gutwin, David Pinelle and Pourang Irani. 2007. Improving recognition and characterization in groupware with rich embodiments. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07), 11-20. (Honourable Mention Award)

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { stach07,
    AUTHOR = { Tadeusz Stach and Carl Gutwin and David Pinelle and Pourang Irani },
    TITLE = { Improving recognition and characterization in groupware with rich embodiments },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07) },
    YEAR = { 2007 },
    PAGES = { 11--20 },
    DOI = { 10.1145/1240624.1240627 },
    NOTE = { Honourable Mention Award },
}