Multimodal Interaction • 2024
In this project, we explore how hybrid meetings can be improved when teams collaborate with physical objects, such as LEGO models, while some participants join remotely. Hybrid work often creates an imbalance between people in the room and those joining remotely. Remote participants can easily feel less involved in the activity, while co-located participants may forget to include them when focusing on the task. Our goal was to explore how multimodal interaction could help make remote collaborators feel more present in these situations. We designed RemoteCollab, an interactive tabletop interface that allows a remote participant to interact with a physical workspace. The remote user can draw directly on the table surface, highlighting objects or areas for the people in the room. These drawings are accompanied by visual and audio feedback, helping the co-located participants quickly notice where the remote user is interacting. The system combines visual input and spatial audio so that participants can both see and hear where the remote collaborator is drawing. This multimodal feedback helps distribute attention during collaborative tasks, such as building LEGO models together. We developed and tested the prototype through an iterative design process, including brainstorming sessions, early design experiments, and user testing. In a final evaluation with 12 participants, we compared different feedback conditions, including visual-only interaction and combinations of audio and visual feedback. Our findings suggest that multimodal interaction can increase the sense of presence of remote collaborators in hybrid work settings. While participants had different preferences regarding audio feedback, the prototype generally helped remote users feel more integrated in the collaboration. Through this project, we explore how multimodal interfaces and physical collaboration spaces can support more balanced hybrid teamwork and strengthen the connection between remote and co-located participants.
Created by: Søren Ellemand Lorenzen, Ida Fink Baun & Gustav Emil Holm Simonsen