A Review of Tele-collaboration Technologies with Respect to Closely Coupled Collaboration ∗
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paper_title: Integrating communication, cooperation, and awareness: the DIVA virtual office environment

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DIVA, a novel environment for group work, is presented. This prototype virtual office environment provides support for communication, cooperation, and awareness in both the synchronous and asynchronous modes, smoothly integrated into a simple and intuitive interface which may be viewed as a replacement for the standard graphical user interface desktop. In order to utilize the skills that people have acquired through years of shared work in real offices, DIVA is modeled after the standard office, abstracting elements of physical offices required to support collaborative work: people, rooms, desks, and documents.
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paper_title: Groupware: some issues and experiences

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Groupware reflects a change in emphasis from using the computer to solve problems to using the computer to facilitate human interaction. This article describes categories and examples of groupware and discusses some underlying research and development issues. GROVE, a novel group editor, is explained in some detail as a salient groupware example
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paper_title: Designing to support situation awareness across distances: an example from a scientific collaboratory

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When collaborating, individuals rely on situation awareness (the gathering, incorporation and utilization of environmental information) to help them combine their unique knowledge and skills and achieve their goals. When collaborating across distances, situation awareness is mediated by technology. There are few guidelines to help system analysts design systems or applications that support the creation and maintenance of situation awareness for teams or groups. We propose a framework to guide design decisions to enhance computer-mediated situation awareness during scientific research collaboration. The foundation for this framework is previous research in situation awareness and virtual reality, combined with our analysis of interviews with and observations of collaborating scientists. The framework suggests that situation awareness is comprised of contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information. Research in virtual reality systems suggests control, sensory, distraction and realism attributes of technology contribute to a sense of presence [Presence 7 (1998) 225]. We suggest that consideration of these attributes with respect to contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information provides insights to guide design decisions. We used the framework when designing a scientific collaboratory system. Results from a controlled experimental evaluation of the collaboratory system help illustrate the framework's utility.
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paper_title: Visual communication and social interaction

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In the production of aluminum ingots by the direct chill casting process, in which the conventional chilled mold is equipped with a thermally insulated "hot top," smooth surfaced ingots are produced under conditions obtained by correlating of the length of the chilled mold, the casting rate and the head of molten metal in the hot top. Preferably the values of chilled mold length and metalostatic head are selected so as to be tolerant of some variation of metalostatic head which is difficult to avoid in the simultaneous operation of a large number of molds under level pour conditions.
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paper_title: Voice loops as cooperative aids in space shuttle mission control

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In domains like air traffic management, aircraft carrier operations, and space mission control, practitioners coordinate their activities through voice loops that allow communication among groups of people who are spatially separate. Voice loops have evolved into essential coordination support tools for experienced practitioners in space shuttle mission control, as well as other domains. We describe how voice loops support the coordination of activities and cognitive processes in event-driven domains like space shuttle mission control. We discuss how the loops help flight controllers synchronize their activities and integrate information, and how they facilitate directed communication and support the negotiation of interruptions. In addition, we suggest factors like attentional cues, implicit protocols, and the structure and features of the loops, which might govern the success of voice loops in the mission control domain. Our results should provide insight into the important functions that should be considered in the development of systems intended to support cooperative work.
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paper_title: Action as language in a shared visual space

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A shared visual workspace allows multiple people to see similar views of objects and environments. Prior empirical literature demonstrates that visual information helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. We present an empirical study that demonstrates how action replaces explicit verbal instruction in a shared visual workspace. Pairs performed a referential communication task with and without a shared visual space. A detailed sequential analysis of the communicative content reveals that pairs with a shared workspace were less likely to explicitly verify their actions with speech. Rather, they relied on visual information to provide the necessary communicative and coordinative cues.
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paper_title: Critical approach to 3D virtual realities for group work

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Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) have been studied extensively during the past few years. In this paper, the concept of virtual reality (VR), and its value for group work are critically examined. To ground the discussions, experiences from a virtual reality project, from 3D chats, and from present CVE applications are analysed in the light of human communication. It is argued that the value of virtual reality is often overemphasised and overrated in the group work context, especially when conce rning desktop virtual realities and generic groupwork without an explicitly defined task or purpose. The main problem with VR is its self-centricity and inadequate support for shared real-life related objects.
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paper_title: Meaning-making across remote sites: how delays in transmission affect interaction

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Distributed organizations increasingly rely on new videosupported communication technologies that may be subject to transmission delays. These delays systematically misalign the feedback one side receives from the other. Through microanalysis of video data from a video-supported meeting in a geographically distributed company, we examine the impact of delay in such communication systems. We specify some ways in which they may subliminally affect communication between remote parties. We illustrate typical kinds of breakdown and conclude with observations about the impact of delays on distributed interaction and the ways in which these impacts can be mediated.
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paper_title: Effects of head-mounted and scene-oriented video systems on remote collaboration on physical tasks

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This study assessed the value of two video configurations-a head-mounted camera with eye tracking capability and a scene camera providing a view of the work environment-on remote collaboration on physical (3D) tasks. Pairs of participants performed five robot construction tasks in five media conditions: side-by-side, audio-only, head-mounted camera, scene camera, and scene plus head cameras. Task completion times were shortest in the side-by-side condition, and shorter with the scene camera than in the audio-only condition. Participants rated their work quality highest when side-by-side, intermediate with the scene camera, and worst in the audio-only and head-camera conditions. Similarly, helpers' self-rated ability to assist workers and pairs' communication efficiency were highest in the side-by-side condition, but significantly higher with the scene camera than in the audio-only condition. The results demonstrate the value of a shared view of the work environment for remote collaboration on physical tasks.
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paper_title: Embodiments, avatars, clones and agents for multi-user, multi-sensory virtual worlds

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This paper explores the issue of user embodiment within collaborative virtual environments. By user embodiment we mean the provision of users with appropriate body images so as to represent them to others and also to themselves. By collaborative virtual environments we mean multi-user virtual reality systems which explicitly support cooperative work (although we argue that the results of our exploration may also be applied to other kinds of collaborative system). The main part of the paper identifies a list of embodiment design issues grouped by the general themes of personal representation, conveying activity, embodiment in heterogeneous systems, embodiment of agents, and ethical issues. These issues are illustrated with examples from our own DIVE and MASSIVE collaborative virtual environments. The paper also uses this set of issues as an analytical framework for comparing a number of other communication technologies.
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paper_title: Empirical Comparison of Human Behavior and Performance with Different Display Devices for Virtual Environments

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Although a wide range of display devices is used in virtual environment (VE) systems, no guidelines exist to choose an appropriate display for a particular VE application. Our goal in this research is to develop such guidelines on the basis of empirical results. In this paper, we present a preliminary experiment comparing human behavior and performance between a head-mounted display (HMD) and a four-sided spatially immersive display (SID). In particular, we studied users' preferences for real vs. virtual turns in the VE. The results indicate that subjects have a significant preference for real turns in the HMD and for virtual turns in the SID. The experiment also found that females are more likely to choose real turns than males. We suggest that HMDs are an appropriate choice when users perform frequent turns and require spatial orientation.
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paper_title: Evaluating Effectiveness of Interaction Techniques across Immersive Virtual Environmental Systems

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This paper presents the results of a formal experiment to compare different interaction techniques across two types of immersive display: an immersive projection technology (IPT) and a head-mounted display (HMD). Our aim is to investigate the effectiveness of two widely used interaction metaphors, virtual hand and ray casting, on these two display technologies. Our motivation is that design and evaluation of interaction techniques for immersive egocentric display systems has been undertaken almost exclusively on HMDs. We argue that basing interaction for IPTs on techniques developed for other types of immersive systems is a flawed approach, as there are some categorical differences between the experience given by an IPT and an HMD. For example, an IPT user has a much wider field of view than an HMD user.We have chosen two types of interaction tasks to study: simple selection of objects both near to and at some distance from the user, and manipulation of objects involving a change of both position and orientation. As previous studies have found, we find that ray casting is preferable for selection and virtual hand is preferable for manipulation for a HMD. We show that this is also the case for the IPT. More interestingly, while we find performance on selection tasks is much better on the IPT, for manipulation tasks there is little difference between the two display technologies.
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paper_title: Transatlantic Touch: A Study of Haptic Collaboration over Long Distance

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The extent to which the addition of haptic communication between human users in a stared virtual environment (SVE) contributes to the shared experience of the users has not received much attention in the literature, In this paper we describe a demonstration of and an expenmental study on haptic interaction between two users over a network of significant physical distance and a number of Network hops. A number of techniques to mitigate instability of the haptic interactions induced by network latency are presented An experiment to evaluate the use of haptics in a coilborative situation mediated by a networked virtual environment is examined The experimental subjects were to cooperate in lifting a virtual box together under one of four conditions in a between-groups design. Questionnaires were used to report the ease with which they could perform the task and the subjective levels of presence ants copresence experienced This extends earlier work by the authors to consider the possibility of haptic collaboration under real network conditions with a Number of improvements. Using the technology described in-this paper, transatlantic touch was successfully demonstrated between the Touch lab at Massachusetts Instatute of Technology, USA and Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics (VECG) lab at University Collegc London (UCL), UK in 2000, It as also presented at the Internet II demonstration meeting in 2002 between University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Instrtute of Technology.
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paper_title: Interacting in distributed collaborative virtual environments

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Virtual reality toolkits and systems for computer supported cooperative work are often treated separately. However, combining them offers new possibilities for remote cooperative (or collaborative) group working. We review existing distribution models of virtual environments and propose a new method of concurrent interaction management. We examine the different types of communication layers, which are needed by collaborative virtual reality (VR) applications to achieve complex user interaction. Finally we propose a model for handling the different requirements of such applications, depending on the connection strategies used within a distributed VR system.
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paper_title: Interaction between Users of Immersion Projection Technology Systems

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Participants using immersive projection technology (IPT) systems tend to behave as if they were really in the space depicted by the displays. This behavioral presence leads them to adopt responses and strategies to events and situations that are similar to what they would adopt in analogous real-world situations. In this paper we discuss what happens when IPT systems are used for tele-collaboration, and each participant sees a virtual environment (VE) that includes representation of another (an avatar). In these situations we see the participants respond to that avatar as if it were the other person. We analyze several recent experiments using IPTs where participants represented to each other using avatars complete tasks together. On one hand, because these are IPT systems, a participant can not see their own avatar, and doesn't know what, if any, of their appearance and behavior is conveyed. On the other hand, they can see the appearance and behaviors of other participants’ avatars. We explore participants' awareness of each other through their avatars, and we demonstrate how participants successfully and unsuccessfully use their own avatar to communicate. We then analyze some of the more complex collaborative situations that are being supported in current applications and show what requirements there are for future research on avatar representations and interaction.
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paper_title: The impact of avatar realism and eye gaze control on perceived quality of communication in a shared immersive virtual environment

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This paper presents an experiment designed to investigate the impact of scommunication in an immersive virtual environment.Participants were paired by gender and were randomly assigned to a CAVE-like system or a head-mounted display. Both were represented by a humanoid avatar in the shared 3D environment. The visual appearance of the avatars was either basic and genderless (like a "match-stick" figure), or more photorealistic and gender-specific. Similarly, eye gaze behavior was either random or inferred from voice, to reflect different levels of behavioral realism.Our comparative analysis of 48 post-experiment questionnaires confirms earlier findings from non-immersive studies using semi-photorealistic avatars, where inferred gaze significantly outperformed random gaze. However responses to the lower-realism avatar are adversely affected by inferred gaze, revealing a significant interaction effect between appearance and behavior. We discuss the importance of aligning visual and behavioral realism for increased avatar effectiveness.
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paper_title: The Pitfalls in System Design for Distributed Virtual Environments: A Case Study

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There is a common understanding amongst the games industry that the Internet is a poor network infrastructure that wreaks havoc on all game engines. This view is shared amongst the Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) research community, who traditionally find the Internet as the main culprit for disruptions in the experience of end users. In fact, the majority of the problems reside in the existing misconceptions regarding the nature of the Internet, leading to inefficient and inadequate network subsystems. This paper reports the lessons learnt from the attempt of using an existing DVE system to support collaboration using haptic devices over the Internet2.
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Title: A Review of Tele-collaboration Technologies with Respect to Closely Coupled Collaboration

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: This section introduces the need for computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) tools and categorizes group interactions according to a time/location matrix, focusing particularly on distributed synchronous teamwork.

Section 2: Closely Coupled Collaboration around Shared Object Interaction
Description 2: This section describes the requirements for collaborative work that involves close interaction with shared physical artifacts, focusing on communication, coordination, and co-presence.

Section 3: Communication of References
Description 3: This section discusses the importance of verbal and non-verbal communication in collaborative work, emphasizing the need for real-time feedback and the role of different communication channels.

Section 4: Shared Context
Description 4: This section highlights the necessity of a shared workspace and context for effective collaboration, stressing on awareness and co-presence.

Section 5: Challenges
Description 5: This section outlines the challenges faced by tele-collaboration technologies, such as conveying interaction, attention, and awareness, and achieving natural and efficient collaboration.

Section 6: Tele-collaboration Technologies
Description 6: This section reviews various tele-collaboration technologies including audio-conferencing, groupware, video-conferencing, tele-presence, mixed reality, and immersive virtual reality, evaluating their support for close interaction.

Section 7: Discussion
Description 7: This section provides a comparative analysis of the reviewed technologies, highlighting their advantages and limitations in supporting closely coupled collaboration.

Section 8: Conclusion
Description 8: This section summarizes the key findings of the review, identifies remaining challenges, and suggests future directions for improving tele-collaboration technologies.