Providing Artifact Awareness to a Distributed Group through Screen Sharing
Date
2006-03-27
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Abstract
Despite the availability of awareness servers and casual interaction
systems, distributed groups still cannot maintain artifact awareness the
easy awareness of the documents, objects, and tools that other people are
using that is a natural part of co-located work environments. To address
this deficiency, we designed an awareness tool that uses screen sharing to
provide information about other people s artifacts. People see others
screens in miniature at the edge of their display, can selectively raise a
larger view of that screen to get more detail, and can engage in remote
pointing if desired. Initial experiences show that people use our tool for
several purposes: to maintain awareness of what others are doing, to project
a certain image of themselves, to monitor progress and coordinate joint
tasks, to help determine when another person can be interrupted, and to
engage in serendipitous conversation and collaboration. People have also been
able to balance awareness with privacy, by using the privacy protection
strategies built into our system: restricting what parts of the screen others
can see, specifying update frequency, hiding image detail, and getting
feedback of when screenshots are taken.
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Computer Science