Supporting Awareness in Mixed Presence Groupware

Mixed presence groupware (MPG) is software that connects both collocated and distributed collaborators together in a shared visual workspace. Our early study of this new genre is that people focus their collaborative energy on collocated partners at the expense of remote partners, which imbalances collaboration. We call this problem presence disparity, caused by the imbalance of awareness exuded by virtual embodiments versus actual people. VideoArms is an embodiment technique that mitigates presence disparity by enhancing awareness of remote collaborators in a mixed presence workspace. We describe how VideoArms works, and the design principles behind its construction. Author