Interpersonal communication is demonstrably more efficient when participants share greater amounts of common ground—mutual knowledge, beliefs, goals, attitudes, etc. These common grounds may exist prior to an interaction, based on shared membership in a specific group or population. Then they are constructed and expanded over the course of the interaction on the basis of linguistic co-presence, and/or physical co-presence.
Communication
media constrain the ease of achieving common ground and the methods for doing
so. Currently, people must have physical co-presence—be at the same place at
the same time—to achieve good visual co-presence. Consequently, task
performance via video-conferencing is demonstrably poorer than it is in
face-to-face settings. The evidence
is that modern video technology is not of high enough quality to improve
grounding.
Our
research has three goals. First, we intend to improve the theoretical
understanding of the attributes of shared visual spaces that improve grounding
and thus task performance. Second,
we intend to learn what parameters make a difference in visual communication
systems that can be deployed for working on complex, collaborative tasks. And we
will assess the tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of using these features
in real-world settings. Third, we
will be creating technology that allows the accurate estimation of the focus of
attention in distributed settings, which is believed to be an important role
that the visual channel plays.
