Design Discussion of the [braccetto] Research Platform: Supporting Distributed Intensely Collaborating Creative Teams of Teams

Abstract

The growing ubiquity of computer processing power, storage and bandwidth has helped stimulate increased interest in computer-mediated interaction in recent years. Concurrently, many technological solutions to essentially human problems are maturing to the point where their higher socio-psychological context is becoming the limiting factor. An example of this is real time collaboration between remote team members, where new telepresence and groupware solutions continue to close the gap between remote and co-located collaboration. Here, an improved understanding of what types of cues are critical to preserve common ground, the coupling of work, and awareness between remote sites is still fundamentally required. In the HxI Initiative we are investigating, designing, developing, and evaluating Human Computer Interaction, Human Human Interaction, and Human Information Interaction for distributed teams of teams who are intensely collaborating. The mixture of co-located and remote interaction in social communication as well as interaction with a shared digital artifact provides complex research challenges in areas which address particular interaction issues such as multiple cursor support, mixed-presence communication, and action-communication disparities. We present the research platform [braccetto] that we designed as an enabler for the investigations of the above research challenges. The hardware design and setup discussed in this paper are the result of careful requirements engineering and design discussions for rapidly composable and adaptable telepresence workstations for distributed, intensely collaborating teams of teams. We also present underlying software services and components as enablers for telepresence and groupware capabilities that are deployed in our application domains.