Successful collaboration at a distance remains a grand challenge for computing. Since their inception, one widely explored use case of immersive systems has been for remote telecollaboration. The vision has been that mixed-reality can both faithfully replicate collaboration at a distance, possibly in real-time reconstructions of real places, but also provide a venue for exploring how collaboration can be enhanced and extended.
In this talk, I'll draw out a thread of research that has looked at the successes and failures of immersive telecollaboration. From early studies on CAVE-like systems through to studies with today's consumer technologies we'll look at how users (in)advertently use their bodies to communicate. The later studies draw on the emerging field of embodied cognition and give some insights into how self-representation as avatars might affect interaction and agency. We'll also look at how asymmetries in immersion lead to biases and thus uncover some requirements and features that systems may need in order to be broadly adopted.
Anthony Steed is Head of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London. His main research interests are in mixed-reality systems and the impact of these systems on telecollaboration. He got started in virtual reality in the early 90s when the main focus was on building effective single user immersive displays. Since then he has worked in measurement of presence and immersion, collaborative virtual reality, mixed reality and novel systems engineering. He has published over 160 papers and is the main author of the book “Networked Graphics: Building Networked Graphics and Networked Games”. In 2018/2019 he was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond and an Erskine Fellow at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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