Mendes D., Sousa M., Ferreira A., Pereira J., Jorge J., (2014) Enabling Remote Proxemics through Multiple Surfaces, ITS 2014, Collaboration Meets Interaction Surfaces.
Abstract: Virtual meetings have become increasingly common with modern video-conference and collaborative software. While they allow obvious savings in time and resources, presence is still elusive. Indeed, remote participants complain about reduced presence away from the “main meeting”, whereas local participants have trouble noticing remote peoples’ activities and focus. We present Eery Proxemics, an extension of Proxemics aimed at bringing the syntax of proximal interactions to virtual meetings and increasing awareness of remote participants’ activities and situation. Our work focuses on virtual meetings facilitated by multiple surfaces, ranging from wall displays to tablets and smartphones. Therefore our goal is to increase mutual awareness of participants, who cannot see each other from different locations, through a shared virtual space. We call this shared realm the Eery Space. Through it we are able to make proxemic interaction area visible to/from far participants to afford proximal interactions and exchanges among meeting participants. Preliminary evaluations carried out with people outside our research group, indicate that our approach is effective at enhancing mutual awareness between participants and sufficient to initiate proximal exchanges regardless of physical location.
Keywords: Interaction Design; Remote Proxemics; Multiple Surfaces; Collaboration; Awareness; Eery Space.