Problem Addressed and Motivation
One of the major problems with distributed teams is the lack of physical interactions. Physicality (through location) allows for significantly easier communication and relationship building. Many attempts have been made to overcome this challenge, and many solutions employ the usage of several real-time audio/video connections.
Research Approach and Evaluation:
The approach the designers took was to first build a system that supported multiple live video/audio streams that was fast, efficient and simulated an immersive sensory environment. A client/server approach was followed for distributing video streams content.
To evaluate the system, the designers first prototyped it with themselves in a distributed work environment. It should be noted that many of the users (because of the participants) already knew each other, which has a major impact on the results, which will be discussed in the following section.
Results:
The results of the evaluation indicated that the system really allowed for distributed interactions. Users did feel like they were able to communicate as though “they were in the same room”, which was indicated by the request for features related to previous interactions using the system. The best way to describe this was the sense of “community” it brought forth, which is difficult to create in a distributed environment.
Contribution:
The main contribution of this research was to demonstrate that pursuing distributed awareness was worthwhile and can contribute to a positive distributed environment.
From a personal perspective, this seems more a validation of common sense in that, yes, its always easier to communicate face to face and trying to pursue that is worthwhile. However, when looking at the evaluation of the system, there was no mention of users who had never met before. Familiarity is a big component of interaction, and I would have been interested to see how this could have affected the result.
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