Maurício Sousa, Daniel Medeiros, Alberto Raposo and Joaquim Jorge.Beyond Eery Space: Applying GradualEngagement to Remote Proxemics. CmIS Workshop (ACM ITS 2015).
Abstract Current collaborative solutions do enable verbal and visual communication between all participants. However, remote people feel a lack of presence in the meetings, rendering
a feeling of not really being there. The outcome is an inef- ficient communication, which can hinder the collaborative work. Eery Space, on the other hand, succeeds at bringing geographically distant people together at the same virtual space, and provides the necessary devices and feedback for participants in virtual meetings to interact with each other using remote proxemics. Despite that, the current approach uses fixed distances initiate proximal interactions producing abrupt transitions between interaction stages. On the other hand, gradual engagement introduces seam- less transitions between stages. In this position paper, we discuss the inclusion of gradual engagement into remote proxemics and propose a design model for future interac- tions.