Deictic gestures, which often manifest as pointing, are an important part of interpersonal communication over shared artifacts on surfaces, such as a map on a table. However, in computer-supported distributed settings, deictic gestures can be difficult to see and understand. This problem can be solved through visualizing hands and arms above distributed surfaces, but current solutions are computationally and programmatically expensive, rely on a limited understanding of how gestures are executed and used, and remain largely unevaluated with regards to their effectiveness. This dissertation describes a solution to these problems in four parts: 1. Qualitative observational studies, both laboratory-based and in the wild, that lead to a greater understanding of how gestures are made over surfaces and what parts of a gesture are important to represent. In particular, these observations identified the height of a gesture as a characteristic not well-supported in distributed groupware. 2. A description of the design space available for representing gestures and candidate designs for showing the height of a gesture in distributed groupware. 3. Experimental evaluations of embodiments that include the representation of gesture height. 4. A toolkit for facilitating the capture and representation of gestures in distributed groupware. This work is the first to describe how deictic gestures are made over surfaces and how to visualize these gestures in distributed settings. The KinectArms Toolkit is the first toolkit to allow developers to add rich arm and hand representations to groupware without undue cost or development effort. This work is important because it provides researchers, designers, and developers with new tools for understanding and supporting communication in distributed settings.

The growing size of organizations is making it increasingly expensive to attend meetings and difficult to retain what happened in those meetings. Meeting video capture systems exist to support video conferencing for remote participation or archiving for later review, but they have been regarded ineffective. The reason is twofold. Firstly, the conventional way of capturing video using a single static camera fails to capture focus and context. Secondly, a single static view is often monotonous, making the video onerous to review. To address these issues, often human camera operators are employed to capture effective videos with changing views, but this approach is expensive. In this thesis, we argue that camera views can be changed automatically to produce meeting videos effectively and inexpensively. We automate the camera view control by automatically determining the visual focus of attention as a function of time and moving the camera to capture it. In order to determine visual focus of attention for different meetings, we conducted experiments and interviewed television production professionals who capture meeting videos. Furthermore, television production principles were used to appropriately frame shots and switch between shots. The result of the evaluation of the automatic camera control system indicated its significant benefits over conventional static camera view. By applying television production principles various issues related to shot stability and screen motion were resolved. The performance of the automatic camera control based on television production principles also approached the performance of trained human camera crew. To further reduce the cost of the automation, we also explored the application of computer vision and audio tracking. Results of our explorations provide empirical evidence in support of the utility of camera control encouraging future research in this area. Successful application of television production principles to automatically control cameras suggest various ways to handle issues involved in the automation process.

No description available.

Educators are seeking ways to better engage their students including the use of collaborative virtual learning environments (CVLEs). Some virtual worlds can serve as CVLEs as the advent of Second Life has created particular interest within the education community. Second Life, however, was not initially designed to facilitate education alone. I propose that as a CVLE, Second Life may be failing educators' expectations of its initial, ongoing, and future use as a system for supporting education. In order to determine how Second Life may be failing educators, I conducted a case study with a group of university-level educators that examined their reasons for and against adopting Second Life as a CVLE, the affordances they explored, the barriers they encountered, and how these affordances and barriers affected student learning and the participant's future use of Second Life and future virtual worlds in education. I then compare their use of Second Life to that of traditional groupware systems. As a result, I propose and detail the development of a rich integrated development environment, application programming interface, more flexible privacy policy, and more robust community tools for educators based on these comparisons.

In almost all collaborative tabletop tasks, groups require coordinated access to the shared objects on the table’s surface. The physical social norms of close-proximity interactions built up over years of interacting around other physical bodies cause people to avoid interfering with other people (e.g., avoiding grabbing the same object simultaneously). However, some digital tabletop situations require the use of indirect input (e.g., when using mice, and when supporting remote users). With indirect input, people are no longer physically embodied during their reaching gestures, so most systems provide digital embodiments – visual representations of each person – to provide feedback to both the person who is reaching and to the other group members. Tabletop arm embodiments have been shown to better support group interactions than simple visual designs, providing awareness of actions to the group. However, researchers and digital tabletop designers know little of how the design of digital arm embodiments affects the fundamental group tabletop interaction of reaching for objects. Therefore, in this thesis, we evaluate how people coordinate their interactions over digital tabletops when using different types of embodiments. Specifically, in a series of studies, we investigate how the visual design (what they look like) and interaction design (how they work) of digital arm embodiments affects a group’s coordinative behaviours in an open- ended parallel tabletop task. We evaluated visual factors of size, transparency, and realism (through pictures and videos of physical arms), as well as interaction factors of input and augmentations (feedback of interactions), in both a co-located and distributed environment. We found that the visual design had little effect on a group’s ability to coordinate access to shared tabletop items, that embodiment augmentations are useful to support group coordinative actions, and that there are large differences when the person is not physically co-present. Our results demonstrate an initial exploration into the design of digital arm embodiments, providing design guidelines for future researchers and designers to use when designing the next generation of shared digital spaces.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-29T15:33:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_4177_.pdf: 2470512 bytes, checksum: 80d24473718896944a6c81552a86f9bb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-08-30 / As lacunas tecnológicas no apoio as atividades colaborativas possibilitam à criação de novas propostas para atender à demanda por suporte tecnológico nas atividades a distância. Este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura de software, baseado da proposta do MOrFEu, que favorece à criação e a organização flexível de espaços virtuais colaborativos. Entre as principais características desta arquitetura destacam-se a flexibilidade do apoio a colaboração pelas formas diferenciadas de coordenar as interações e organizar as produções, individuais e coletivas, tendo como referência espaços de autoria reorganizáveis e flexíveis. Por fim, foi realizado um estudo de caso, utilizando um protótipo de software, na avaliação do suporte tecnológico no atendimento aos requisitos das atividades de comunicação, cooperação e principalmente de coordenação da Arquitetura Pedagógica Debate de Teses.

Muitos dos atuais sistemas computacionais de apoio ao ensino podem ser considerados parte de uma evolução que tem enfatizado a exploração de sistemas hipermídia em geral, e da Web em particular. A pesquisa associada ao trabalho aqui reportado tem como objetivo explorar as tecnologias de Hipermídia e Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) para viabilizá-las em um ambiente que suporte o acesso de alunos a hiperdocumentos de conteúdo didático de forma cooperativa ¾ o ambiente StudyConf. Para promover a interação entre alunos que visitam um determinado hiperdocumento, o StudyConf controla suas navegações e gera, dinamicamente, sessões de discussão entre os mesmos. O StudConf mantém o registro das discussões realizadas na forma de hiperdocumentos estruturados, os quais podem ser utilizados, por exemplo, para a geração cooperativa de documentos, conforme proposto em várias ferramentas Computer Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL). O trabalho aqui reportado colaborou, ainda, para o desenvolvimento de uma técnica que tem como objetivo orientar o projeto de aplicações hipermídia que manipulam informações na Web. / Many of the current computational systems dedicated to support teaching and learning can be considered part of an evolution that has emphasized hypermedia systems in general, and the World Wide Web in particular. The work here reported aims at exploiting the technologies of hypermedia and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in an environment that supports collaborative access from students to hyperdocuments ¾ supported in a tool called StudyConf. In order to promote interaction among students that navigate on the same hyperdocuments, StudyConf controls their navigation and generates dynamic discussion sessions with the students that visit the same material. StudyConf registers the discussions as structured hyperdocuments, which can be used to exploit proposals regarding the collaborative authoring of contents that are present in several Computer Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL) tools. The work here reported has also contributed to the proposal of a technique aimed at guiding the development of general web-based hypermedia applications.

The goal of this research was to investigate communication media and feedback learning cues for tutoring. A macroergonomic perspective was used to identify three sociotechnical variables associated with tutoring assistance: problem analyzability, communication media, and learning feedback cues. A four-phase problem solving approach was used in all trials. The communication media consisted of collocated communication, email, a chatroom, and video teleconferencing. The learning feedback cue was a non-verbal mechanism for subjects to provide the tutor with immediate information about their understanding throughout the problem. Subjects participated in a total of eight trials over a four-week time period. The analysis accuracy, process time, and user satisfaction indicated that the four-phase problem solving approach was not important in the interpretation of the results. In each problem-solving phase and for the overall tutoring process, technical performance (e.g., accuracy and speed of problem solving) and user satisfaction were measured to determine the most effective communication technology (or technologies) for tutoring students. The results of this study indicated that the accuracy was similar for all experimental conditions. However, the speed of problem solving was generally faster for audio-visual communication than text-based communication. In all phases, subjects were significantly more satisfied in conditions without feedback cues. And in general, satisfaction was higher in collocated communication and the chatroom compared to email; satisfaction was generally higher in collocated communication compared to video teleconferencing. There was no evidence that computer-mediated communication improved the tutoring process. However, important design implications existed for tutoring systems with limited resources. Through computer-mediated communication, a single tutor could assist many students at one time. The chatroom appeared to be a condition that would be an effective communication medium for spatially dispersed tutoring. Although the tutoring process required significantly more time to complete using the chatroom compared to collocated communication, accuracy and satisfaction measures were similar between collocated communication and the chatroom. / Master of Science

No description available.

The goal of this thesis is to present the virtual environments research community with a thorough investigation of collaborative awareness in Tele- immersion and related immersive virtual environments. Tele-immersion was originally defined in 1996 by Tom Defanti of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), is "the union of networked VR and video in the context of significant computing and data mining" [Leigh, et. al., 1997]. Since then, research on Tele-immersion has outgrown most of its system and performance-related issues and now focuses supporting collaborative interaction and usability. Tele-immersion now deals with the "[creation of persistent virtual environments] enabling multiple, globally situated participants to collaborate over high-speed and high-bandwidth networks connected to heterogeneous supercomputing resources and large data stores" [Leigh, et. al., 1997, p. 1 of 9]. In the early stages of Tele- immersion there were two main factors driving the research: the significant processing load of real-time and simulated computational steering, and the sheer bulk of the data sets being generated for scientific visual analysis [Leigh, et. al., 1997]. Now the growing number of immersive VR sites is motivating a need to support human-to-human interaction and work over wide networks of immersive virtual environments. This research focuses heavily on issues of collaborative awareness in these networked, immersive virtual environments. Collaborative awareness, in this context, is a concept that encompasses the caveats of one's knowledge about the CVE and its occupants. As a result of this study, software has been designed to provide support not only for collaborative awareness, but also for several other dimensions of collaboration. / Master of Science