Analyzing the Impacts of Location Awareness in Mobile Collaboration

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Analyzing the Impacts of Location Awareness in
Mobile Collaboration

• Nicolas Nova
• CRAFT/EPFL

10 May 2005 IDI_Ivrea
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My Ph.D project CatchBob!

• Short bio cognitive sciences gt HCI/CSCW
• Exploratory/empirical study of a collaborative
  mobile game.
• Analyse how people make use of location
  information.
• Previous work in VR location awareness impacts
  collaborative problem solving for task
  performance and collaborative processes
  (coordination, supports division of labor,
  grounding and mutual modeling).
• Approach design and testing/experimenting.

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Location awareness and group work

• Certain (joint) activities are performed in
  different locations needs to know where
  colleagues are archeologists, firefighters,
  militaries, emergency crew, doctors, teachers,
  nurse, geologists, bus drivers
• Actors do inferences from partners whereabouts
• Position (present) where is my partner what
  he/she is doing/looking at
• Trace (past) where she has been which info
  he/she achieved/collected so far
• Direction (future) where he is heading to what
  are her/his intents? what is his/her strategy,
  her direction

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Location based services

• navigation -

place annotations -
location tracking
multi-user
single-user
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The mobile game CatchBob!
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Ongoing experiment

• 2 conditions with or without others positions
• 10 teams of 3 in each conditions (60 users)
• Among a team knew each other and the campus
• Procedure planning, game, questionnaire, group
  replay

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Results

• No significant differences in terms of
  performance (time path lengths)
• Players who where given the partners location
  made more errors about partners whereabouts.
• More messages when not given the location of the
  partner (more messages about position AND
  direction, strategy, questions when not given the
  partners location).
• Negative correlation between nb of strategy
  messages AND number of mistakes people who
  annotate a lot do not make less errors.

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Current conclusion

• In this context, automatically knowing where the
  others are did not facilitate task performance
• AND it does not facilitate the representation of
  the others path in space.

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CSCW Course (1)

• Students has to design table meant to support
  collaboration.
• Just table, no tech
• Empirical study of the table

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CSCW Course (2)

• Critical events problem and best practices
• Movement analysis

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Thank you!

• nicolas.nova_at_epfl.ch
• More here
• CatchBob! http//craftsrv1.epfl.ch/research/catchb
  ob/
• Table design and CSCW http//craft.epfl.ch/Jahia/
  site/craft/op/edit/pid/52932
• Pasta and Vinegar (my blog) http//tecfa.unige.ch
  /pav/