Visual Copresence Project - Research Research 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.
Communication media constrain the ease of achieving common ground and the methods for doing so.
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.