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Same Time-Different Place

Video Comms

  • Technology ranges over time
    • Dedicated systems - internet, webcam, mobile phones
  • 3 Major uses
    • Explicit Videoconferencing
    • Pervasive social context
    • Integration into collaborative tools
  • Reasons for use
    • (Hopefully) cheaper (not just money) than traveling

Access Grid

  • A collection of resources and technologies that enables large format audio and video based collaboration between groups of people in different locations
  • Developed at Argonne National Laboratory
  • Part of "The Grid" - a network of high performance computing nodes
  • Theoretically no limit to number of connected sites

Gaza Awareness

  • Several states of gaze awareness
  • Mutual Gaze awareness - eye contact - knowing if someone is looking at you
  • Partial Gaze awareness - knowing the direction someone is looking
  • Full Gaze awareness - knowing what someone is looking at

Spatial Faithfulness

  • How accurately each users gaze or gesture is conveyed to the other participants in relation to them and their physical space
  • Distorted by separating camera and screen

Mutual Spatial Faithfulness

  • When A looks at B, B can see A is looking at him
  • Same with when not looking
  • Simultaneously trye for both (all) people
  • Then they have mutual spatial faithfulness
  • Difficult in groups as dont know where people are etc

Gaza-2

  • 3D meeting room with video avatars
  • Avatars automatically route and face the avatar of the person they are talking to
    • Based on eye tracking
    • Others see who each person is looking at

MultiView

  • For group-to-group meetings
  • Tries to coordinate spatial faithfulness
  • Show to
    • preserve gaze awareness
    • encourage trust formation
    • encourage common ground

Moving onto Media Spaces

  • Usually video-broadcast of (multiple) remote locations
  • For awareness not for supporting communication
    • thus uses lower framerates
  • Usually long term, persistent video connections
    • Rather than per-use connections