Investigating Immersive Collaboration Across Temporal States

Abstract

As technological advancements continue to enable globally distributed work, teams are increasingly comprised of experts who are geographically separated. While telepresence solutions such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams enable remote collaboration among team members, these applications do not afford a common space for shared activity comparable to a physical workplace. Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) represent a next generation of telepresence solutions that enable geographically distributed teams to collaborate within a shared digital workspace analogous to an in-person office. Team members are embodied in these CVEs through Head-Worn Displays (HWDs), which capture user movements and behaviors using various sensors and replicate them onto their virtual representations: avatars. By leveraging CVEs and their capacity to represent and communicate user actions, cooperative work can occur in ways akin to co-located collaboration while removing geographical constraints. However, research must examine how to support this telepresence modality across temporal contexts for it to meaningfully support collaboration. This dissertation examines four CVE research efforts to determine best practices for supporting collaboration across time. Specifically, it contributes by: (1) exploring the use of synthetic visuals to augment nonverbal expressions during synchronous collaboration; (2) investigating interactive guided tours with natural annotations (i.e., avatar recordings) to facilitate change awareness and information recall during asynchronous collaboration; (3) identifying the potentials and limitations of each temporal state in XR collaboration, including the introduction and examination of bichronous collaboration as a previously underexplored temporal state; and (4) evaluating the use of emerging technologies, specifically conversational agents, to support question–answer exchanges when live collaborators are unavailable, thereby aiding interpretation of prior contributions within a CVE.