The Effect of Collaboration Styles and View Independence on Video-Mediated Remote Collaboration

This paper investigates how different collaboration styles and view independence affect remote collaboration. Our remote collaboration system shares a live video of a local user’s real-world task space with a remote user. The remote user can have an independent view or a dependent view of a shared real-world object manipulation task and can draw virtual annotations onto the real-world objects as a visual communication cue. With the system, we investigated two different collaboration styles; (1) remote expert collaboration where a remote user has the solution and gives instructions to a local partner and (2) mutual collaboration where neither user has a solution but both remote and local users share ideas and discuss ways to solve the real-world task. In the user study, the remote expert collaboration showed a number of benefits over the mutual collaboration. With the remote expert collaboration, participants had better communication from the remote user to the local user, more aligned focus between participants, and the remote participants’ feeling of enjoyment and togetherness. However, the benefits were not always apparent at the local participants’ end, especially with measures of enjoyment and togetherness. The independent view also had several benefits over the dependent view, such as allowing remote participants to freely navigate around the workspace while having a wider fully zoomed-out view. The benefits of the independent view were more prominent in the mutual collaboration than in the remote expert collaboration, especially in enabling the remote participants to see the workspace.