Research on supporting life-sized remote-video cooperative work where users can freely move around without distinguishing local from remote

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In the environment for life-sized remote-video cooperative work without distinguishing local from remote, we have verified the importance of symmetry that local and remote users can refer to each other's activity by running three experiments. In the first experiment, we gave the conversation communication-centered task in which the seat positions of local and remote subjects are fixed and there are no physical objects to be shared. Since the images at life size are displayed on LCD panels, the bodies and faces of users are oriented to the LCD panels and we observed that users had active interaction. In the second experiment, We conducted an experiment in which distant users free move around a center table and share a work space on the center table. There, we examined whether showing the upper body of distant collaborators is valuable for group work that requires body movement during their work. A comparative study with and without upper body images indicated that group work were more e … More fficient when upper body images were shown. We infer that upper body images helped them predict and brace for distant collaborator's subsequent movement due to improved similarity. In the third experiment, To alleviate the problem of invisibility that remote gestures often get occluded, transected, and slipped out of one's attention, we proposed a technique, "remote lag," that aims to mitigate the invisibility problems. The technique provides people with an instant playback of the remote gestures to recover from the invisible or missed context of coordination. To examine the effects of the proposed technique to the symmetry property, we studied four-person groups engaging in two mentoring tasks using physical objects with and without remote lags. Our results show that remote lags are effective in alleviating the invisibility problems, resulting in fewer questions/confirmations and redundant instructions during collaboration. Although the technique seems to increase a helper's physical effort, it decreases the helper's overall effort in performing the tasks and alleviates both collaborators' temporal demands. Less