Embodiments and VideoArms in Mixed Presence Groupware

Mixed Presence Groupware (MPG) is software that connects collocated and distributed collaborators together in a shared visual workspace. The problem is that collaborators in MPG focus their collaborative energies almost exclusively on their collocated partners, ignoring their distributed counterparts. This arises because remote collaborators are disembodied when compared to their collocated cohorts: they lack the material presence that informs others of their actions. In this paper, we recap how physical bodies facilitate collaboration in physical workspaces via feedthrough, consequential communication and gestures. We recast this theory as four design implications for virtual embodiments that minimize the disparity between collocated and remote collaborators within MPG. We use these properties to design VideoArms, a video-based mechanism that captures people’s body actions within a physical workspace, and then digitally recreates them as virtual embodiments throughout the MPG workspace.