EAGER: Collaborative Research: Attention, (Re)Action, and Perception: Measuring Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments

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Current communication and collaboration technologies fall short of providing the highly interactive and multi-modal capabilities that can transform team performance. Collaborative virtual environments present an entirely new way for distributed collaborators to interact and work. A metric of the quality of a collaborative virtual environment is the degree to which it creates a sense of presence described as the feeling of ?being there? in the virtual place, but there is limited empirical evidence regarding the link between presence and performance, particularly in the context of collaborative teamwork. Establishing the link between presence and performance is complicated by the challenge of capturing objective, appropriately sensitive behavioral indicators of collaborative virtual presence and exploring various environmental and individual influences. This project will: (1) develop a measurement methodology for assessing attention and (re)action as behavioral (non-subjective) indicators of collaborative virtual presence in collaborative virtual environments; (2) examine the relationship between behavioral and perceptual measures of collaborative virtual presence in a collaborative virtual environment; and (3) explore the sensitivity of the collaborative virtual presence measures to varied environmental conditions and individual characteristics. This research is fundamental to the development and evolution of potentially transformative collaborative virtual environments for organizational work. Given the central role of presence in the utility of collaborative virtual environments, we must have reliable measures and measurement instruments in order to enable the manipulation of presence as a design variable. This research will result in a measurement methodology for capturing behavioral indicators of collaborative virtual presence and an assessment of the predictive capability and sensitivity of the collaborative virtual presence measures.