improving recognition and characterization in groupware with rich embodiments
Embodiments are visual representations of people in a groupware system. Embodiments convey awareness information such as presence, location, and movement -- but they provide far less information than what is available from a real body in a face-to-face setting. As a result, it is often difficult to recognize and characterize other people in a groupware system without extensive communication. To address this problem, information-rich embodiments use ideas from multivariate information visualization to maximize the amount of information that is represented about a person. To investigate the feasibility of rich embodiment and their effects on group interaction, we carried out three studies. The first shows that users are able to recall and interpret a large set of variables that are graphically encoded on an embodiment. The second and third studies demonstrated rich embodiments in two groupware systems -- a multiplayer game and a drawing application -- and showed that the enhanced representations do improve recognition and characterization, and that they can enrich interaction in a variety of ways.
rich embodiment embodiment telepointers avatars