Artifact Awareness for Distributed Groups
through screen and window sharing

In a co-located work environment, people's desktops (both physical and digital) are easily visible to others walking by. Being able to see who is around and what they are working on creates opportunities for collaboration. For example, seeing artifacts such as documents or pictures on another's desk can trigger conversation.

In distributed groups however, this artifact awareness is difficult to maintain. When people are working together from different locations, they don't have the same awareness cues that co-located people have, so it's harder for them to move into interaction.

To address this problem, we designed an awareness tool that uses screen sharing to provide information about other people's artifacts. People see others' screens in miniature at the edge of their display, can selectively raise a larger view of that screen to get more detail, and can engage in remote pointing if desired.

Initial experiences from informal evaluations with an internal research group as well as an external industry group show that people use the tool for several purposes: to maintain awareness of what others are doing, to project a certain image of themselves, to monitor progress and coordinate joint tasks, to help determine when another person can be interrupted, and to engage in serendipitous conversation and collaboration. People also balance awareness with privacy by using several privacy protection strategies built into our system.

Researchers

Kimberly Tee (MSc research)
Saul Greenberg (Supervisor)
Carl Gutwin

Key Publications

Tee, K., Greenberg, S. and Gutwin, C. (2006) Providing Artifact Awareness to a Distributed Group through Screen Sharing. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - ACM CSCW 2006, pages 99-108, November 4-8. Earlier version as Report 2006-828-01, March.

Tee, K., Greenberg, S., Gutwin, C. and McEwan, G. (2006) Shared Desktop Media Item: The Video. In Demonstration and short paper, Adjunct Proceedings ACM CSCW 2006, November. Video and two page paper, duration 4:00.

Tee, Kimberly (2007) Artifact Awareness for Distributed Groups through Screen Sharing. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, December.

Tee, K., Greenberg, S. and Gutwin, C. (2008) Artifact Awareness through Screen Sharing for Distributed Groups. Research report 2008-898-11, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June. This paper expands on the similarly titled CSCW paper.

Other Publications

Greenberg, S., Brush, A.J., Carpendale, S., Diaz-Marino, R., Elliot, K., Gutwin, C., McEwan, G., Neustaedter, C., Nunes, M., Smale,S. and Tee, K. (2007) Collected Posters from the Nectar Annual General Meeting. Research report 2007-887-39, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, December.

Tee, K., Greenberg, S., McEwan, G. and Gutwin, C. (2006) Sharing Desktops with the Community Bar. In Demonstration and short paper, Adjunct Proceedings ACM CSCW 2006.