There are hundreds if not thousands of graduate students and post-docs out there right now laboring to crack the most enigmatic conundrum of the modern age. You guessed it: Teleconferencing.
The main question seems to be, How do we create monsterously expensive machines that emulate what we see and do every day?
[IMAGE: Custom-made Jaron Lanier bobble head by HeadBobble.com. DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 07 | July 2006 | Technology]
Personally, I have test-driven scores of the by-products. These include virtual whiteboards, tablets, projection devices, touch-screen monitors, and--I'm not making this up--dry erase pen ifrared prophelactics. This gizmo requires the user to put big, bulky plastic covers over the pens, thus enabling two ifrared sensors to track every movement of the hand. Awkward, to stay the least. And the results are marginal.
Each attempt to make the tele-immersion experience of writing bulletpoints on a white board seems to miss the main issue--the human nervous system is a greedy bastard always clamoring for more input.
This is why even having a bad, but physically present lecturer is more interesting than the most engaging talking head on a computer screen.
The one exception is, however, grandparent + grandchild + computer videocam. Believe me, that combo never gets old, at least for the older demographic in the equation.
Jaron Lanier has been wrestling with this for a couple of decades. He actually coined the term "virtual reality" in the 80s and later served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative--the federally funded project to create the real world prototype of the holodeck.
Jaron laments the human quality that make our recreation of reality very difficult, in a piece titled "Why your next telephone may come mounted on a neck":
The most famous unsolved problem in videoconferencing involves eye contact: Since the camera and the display screen are separate objects, each time you look at the screen you shift your eyes from the camera. Someone watching you in a videoconference notices that you constantly look away. If the camera is above the screen, you always appear to be looking down. Studies show that this lack of eye contact reduces trust, collaboration effectiveness, and satisfaction with the interaction.
This bodes well for those of us who ply our trade in rooms filled with people. Many of them spent hours on planes, trains and automobiles and racked up points on their personal carbon meters to watch us doodle.
But when oh when will the virtual wall be broken through and offer us the true feeling of "being there"?
In this month's issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Meredith Ringel Morris (along with half-a-dozen contributing researchers) explores how design alternatives for tabletop
interfaces can impact group dynamics to promote effective teamwork. They built
and evaluated a series of novel prototypes that explore Multi-User Coordination
Policies and cooperative gesturing, encouraging equitable participation in
educational tasks and supporting social skills development for special-needs
populations.
Photo at above right: When all four group members simultaneously perform the “neaten” gesture, the result is the cooperative gesture for “organize table.” All photos on the table are swept into a single, central pile. Because the same action has valid single-user and multiuser interpretations in CollabDraw, it exemplifies an additive-effect gesture.
Photo below: CollabDraw adds a creative aspect to drawing by making it a cooperative action, as shown in this modify ink gesture. The left-side user’s finger specifies the (x, y) coordinates where ink will appear, and the right-side user’s fingers specify the resulting stroke’s width.
These virtual tabletops allow for both eye-to-eye contact and a virtually simulated work surface. The users can draw, erase, move objects, spread them out, "neaten" them (see photo), and interact in collaborative tasks and games. Just think: in the future, we won't need an entire closet dedicated to boxes of board games like Candyland, Monopoly and Risk!
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