HCC: Medium: Improving collaboration in remote teams through tools to promote mutual understanding of nonverbal behavior

虚拟团队合作正变得越来越普遍，特别是随着远程工作的增加。分散的虚拟团队经常受到社会习俗、工作方式和对话规范不匹配的挑战，这可能会导致误解，从而对团队成员之间的关系和团队工作的质量产生负面影响。已经为远程团队工作开发了许多工具，包括传统的电子邮件和文本聊天；视频会议；以及虚拟、增强和混合现实。它们通常试图重现人们在面对面会议中的行为方式。这个项目不是重新创建面对面的互动，而是致力于创造环境，提高人们远程协作的能力，同时考虑到非语言沟通的方式和组成团队的个人的独特品质。目标是改善远程交互，以及团队稍后可能面对面会面时的交互。这项研究将使人们更容易远程参与虚拟团队，并减少旅行需求。它还将提供工具来培训年轻人STEM，通过为7-9年级女孩举办的年度扩展你的视野计划和为高中女孩举办的康奈尔工程学院研究计划的研讨会。这项研究利用VR独特的负担能力来创建新的干预措施，利用非语言交流来帮助团队成员了解如何在特定的团队合作环境中最好地产生和解释彼此的行为。具体地说，这个项目将(A)建立关于个人差异如何影响人们在面对面和VR环境中的非语言行为及其解释的基本理解；(B)采用迭代设计方法来开发新的VR技术，以调节人们在VR中的语言和非语言行为，以帮助团队成员相互适应对方的行为；(C)调查用户如何更喜欢使用这种工具来管理他们自己的自我展示，以及他们如何更愿意从团队成员那里接收反馈；以及(D)通过受控实验室研究、学生项目团队的实地研究以及与行业合作伙伴进行的自然主义实地研究，评估这些技术的有效性。这项研究开发了关于如何表现行为以改善协作的设计指南，以及在保持个人自主的同时改变行为的技术。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Virtual teamwork is becoming increasingly common, especially with the increase in remote work. Distributed, virtual teams are often challenged by mismatches in social conventions, work styles, and conversational norms, which can lead to misunderstandings that negatively affect relationships among team members and the quality of group work. Many tools have been developed for remote teamwork, involving traditional email and text chat; video conferencing; and virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. These generally try to recreate the way people behave in face-to-face meetings. Rather than recreate face-to-face interactions, this project works to create environments that improve people’s abilities to collaborate remotely, taking into account how non-verbal communication works and unique qualities of the individuals that make up a team. The goal is to improve interactions both remotely and when teams may later meet in-person. This research will make it easier for people to participate remotely in virtual teams and reduce the need for travel. It will also provide tools to train youth in STEM, through workshops at the annual Expanding Your Horizons program for 7th-9th grade girls and the Cornell Research in Engineering Academy program for high school girls.This research draws on unique affordances of VR to create novel interventions that draw on nonverbal communication to help team members understand how best to produce and interpret each other’s behaviors within a particular teamwork context. Specifically, this project will (a) develop a basic understanding about how individual differences influence people's own nonverbal behaviors and interpretations thereof in face-to-face and VR settings; (b) employ an iterative design approach to develop novel VR techniques that modulate people's verbal and nonverbal behavior in VR, to help team members mutually accommodate each other's behaviors; (c) investigate how users prefer to use such tools to manage their own self-presentation, and how they prefer to receive feedback from their teammates; and (d) evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques through controlled laboratory studies, field studies of student project teams, and a naturalistic field study with an industry partner. This research develops design guidelines on how to represent behavior in order to improve collaboration, and techniques to transform behavior while preserving individual autonomy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.