An empirical comparison of copresent and technologically-mediated interaction based on communicative breakdown

Abstract

Within the area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), there has been an explosion of interest in how recently developed network technologies might be applied to support the collaborative endeavors of widely distributed participants. Increasingly powerful systems for desktop conferencing, group meeting, and distributed design have been developed. Though the technologies applied in such systems vary widely, their underlying design goal is essentially the same: to support interactions that are functionally equivalent to face-to-face interaction. This dissertation evaluates the extent to which currently available technologies achieve this goal by comparing the amount of communicative breakdown experienced by pairs of participants interacting in three communication environments: copresent, audio-mediated and audio/video-mediated. In all three environments, participants had access to a shared workspace, in which they used a graphical computer simulation to collaboratively explore the behavior of a simple cardiovascular system. Videotaped interactions were analyzed in a series of three studies, intertwining