Due to the emergence of many teams where individual collaborators are spatially remote, there is currently a great need for tools supporting communication in such groups. Videoconferencing seems to be one of the best possible choices as it allows us to mediate a better sense of “being together” with the remote participants than, e.g., a mail communication.While videoconferencing between individuals has become quite common and quite a few systems have been developed (e.g., Skype), attention is now turned to videoconferencing environments that would support collaboration between remote groups of people. In this setting, problems known from previous research (e.g., preservation of gaze awareness and other non-verbal cues) become even more salient and creation of specialized systems is therefore necessary.

Main goal of our team is to create a videoconferencing tool/environment, which supports communication between multiple groups of people (e.g. several subteams on a same project, each placed remotely from the rest). Our primary aim are teams of up to 10-15 people (when all the subgroups are added together). Another set of requirements that we have tried to incorporate into our design are the principles of flexibility, mobility and low-cost — this means that it should be possible to change the layout of our environment quickly depending on the number of participants/groups and, if possible, allow this number to change on the fly; once installed it should not difficult be to move the entire setup if needed; and the hardware requirements should be very modest (in order to allow the environment to be used even by short-term groups).

Over the last few years we have iteratively developed environment called GColl, that should fulfill most of the requirements above. We have also implemented a proof-of-concept prototype version, which has been recently evaluated by a user study with positive results (see paper [1]). For detailed information please see the sections Design of GColl and Current Implementation.

Current Work:

There are three major streams of work we are currently focusing on. First are additional usability tests (both real-life and laboratory ones) which would help us evaluate GColl in more detail and, possibly, suggest further elaborations of the design. Second direction focuses on the tools we use to “choose” a user during the conference. While currently this is done by using a mouse or a keyboard, we are thinking about utilizing eye-tracking tools (using the stream from the focus camera) to allow participants to select other users via their gaze direction. The most interesting part here will probably be the creation of appropriate heuristics to distinguish between a casual glance and focused attention. The third area is the addition of deixis support to GColl design (i.e., the ability to share materials such as slides, notes, maps or other kinds of documents among the distributed group).

Publications:

1. Slovák, P., Troubil, P., Holub, P. GColl: Enhancing Trust in Flexible Group-to-Group Videoconferencing. In CHI 2010 - Works in Progress. To appear. PDF
2. Slovák, P., Troubil, P., Holub, P. GColl : A Flexible Videoconferencing Environment for Group-to-Group Interaction. In Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2009. 2009. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009. p. 165-168, 4 pp. ISBN 978-3-642-03657-6.
3. Slovák, P., Troubil, P., Holub, P. GColl: Group-to-group Videoconferencing System: Design and First Experiences. In The 5th International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. 2009. 9 pp.