Physically Controlling Virtual Blinds

People increasingly need to work collaboratively across a distance. Although telecommunication technologies offer sophisticated audioand video support, signaling awareness of the remote parties’ availability in a videoconferencing environment is still not uniformly agreed upon. The opening and closing of blinds in a collocated office environment however sends a strong signal about privacy, availability and intrusiveness to co-workers. We are proposing a tangible blinds interface that is based on a real blinds mechanism, in order to signal availability of the participants in a videoconferencing environment. Augmenting a virtual collaboration environment with tangible artifacts based on traditional office settings can allow for enhanced affordances, support a common-knowledge of underlying meaning and blend the overall physical environment with the virtuality of the interaction. With our research, we are hoping to inspire other researchers to utilize the affordances and underlying meanings of traditional tangible interactions and mechanisms in their designs for enhanced telecommunication technologies.