Seconds Matter: Improving Distributed Coordination By Tracking And Visualizing Display Trajectories

Pauses in distributed groupware activity can indicate anything from technical latency through infrastructure failure to a participant's thoughtful contemplation. Unraveling these ambiguities highlights mismatches between unseen off-screen activities and on-screen cursor behaviors. In this paper we suggest that groupware systems have typically been poor at representing off-screen activities, and introduce the concept of display trajectories to bridge the sensor gap between the display and its surrounding space. We consider requirements for display trajectories using the distributed social scientific analysis of video data as an example domain. Drawing on these requirements, we prototype a freeform whiteboard pen tracking and visualization technique around displays using ultrasound. We describe an experiment which inspects the impact of display trajectories on remote response efficiency. Our findings show that visualization of the display trajectory improves participants' ability to coordinate their actions by one second per interaction turn, reducing latency in organizing turn taking by a 'standard maximum' conversation pause.