HP Halo Studio

Just a quick post about my personal experiences with a relatively high fidelity EMS: HP Halo Studio. Halo Studio is a dedicated meeting room where only one side of a table is reserved for co-located participants. The other side is covered by 3 large plasma displays showing remote participants. This allows a connection between 4 geographically separated Halo rooms.

From http://hphalo.org/

 Above the 3 remote participant displays, there is an additional display for sharing content. Sharing is supported from a laptop or physically through an overhead HD camera (e.g., sharing a paper document on the table).

One interesting aspect is that the system supports (to some extent) eye contact and spatial gesturing. This is achieved by a 3-axis controlled patent-pending camera system. Above all 3 remote participants displays, there is a video camera that can be rotated around 3 axis. I took a few photos from the "engine room" behind the displays:

 This seems to work surprisingly well. Overlapping talk and other turn taking problems still exist, but significanly less than in typical teleconference settings.

My experiences with one EMS

At work we sometimes use an electronic meeting system that consists of shared desktop and participant list. This system we use doesn't support voice or text chatting, so all the conversation has to happen with phone. It's only possible for one person or a meeting group to share their desktop at a time and changing the sharer is quite challenging. The participant list shows who are present and of course hearing them over phone helps too. All the participants can see the desktop sharers mouse pointer on the screen.

If I quickly think what I would change or add in this system, I would say that easier change of the shared desktop and conversation possibility (without extra phone). There isn't more support for awareness than the participant list, but that does't give any information about is anyone really listening or watching. But I wouldn't say that more awareness is needed in this case, since all the meetings are conserning work and everyone are (or at least should be) paying attention ;).

It would be nice to have meetings face to face when it involves explaining and brainstorming for example about pictures, but many times that's not possible because of long dinstances. When using these electronic meeting systems it is obvious that when they are designed well, it  helps to reduce work time and of course users are happy too.

IRC vs. Facebook and MS Messenger – two against one?

Until recent years IRC was very popular and widely used. (Or at least more popular and more widely used that it is today.) Surely it is still used, but my experience is that its popularity is fading. In my social circles it is apparently so that Facebook has replaced IRC. The other reason seems to be that as “our generation” of IRC-users is getting older and for reasons like job and family has no time or interest to hang on IRC-channels, there are no newcomers any more. Generation Facebook probably feels that the text-based, non-graphical commucation medium is not appealing nor interesting. For same time messaging there's now Facebook chat, and for example widely popular MS Messenger.

As I listed the grounding constraints [1.] for them, I realized that they are quite similar, all the tree of them, IRC, Facebook chat and Messenger:

copresense: no
visibility: no
audibility: no
contemporality: no
simultaneity: sort of
sequentiality: yes
reviewability: yes
revisability: yes

IRC has advantages like logging and that you can have more than one person on the same conversation (with channels). I've understood that Messenger has the same feature (though I've never used it myself). But even if these three are quite similar with the ways of communicating, IRC is the one losing popularity. As I said, my guess is that it's because of text-based interface.

I think it's very unfortunate IRC isn't the way it used to be. It had a unique conversation culture and it was also a kind of “hobby” or “lifestyle”. People were there and talking even if they had nothing particular to inform or to ask. And on these occasion discussions developed spontaneously on various topics. In my opinion, both FB and Messenger are mostly media you use for some particular thing: to ask, to inform, to arrange something etc. Of course, in a conversation with just a one other person the discussion can be informal and the topics vary and change. But after you've shared your thoughts and feelings with your friend on that particular chatting session, and you've ended your discussion, does it have a habit to sparkle up again as you spontaneously start conversation for example about your favorite films or the daily news?

What I'm trying to say is, that when the members in the communication situation are both few and well-know to each other, the conversation tends to follow certain pattern(s). And perhaps you already know your friend's favorite movies so there's no need to talk about them. When the participants vary more, there's also possibility to have some new opinions on old topics and to start to discuss on something very different. In IRC there's quite low threshold to change topic or say something “out of ordinary”, and this sort of unexpectedness isn't typical when you discuss with a friend. On contrary, it's kind of rude if you just change a subject to something which has nothing to do with your previous topics!

Even with all these advantages I've listed, using IRC is less common than before. Personally I'd prefer interesting conversations over modern, attractive user interface, but obviously I'm in a minority (again...).

References:
1. Clark & Brennan (1991) Grounding in communication.
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~herb/1990s/Clark.Brennan.91.pdf

The Importance of Cell Phones In Our days

In our days, everybody has his own cell phone. There are a lot of kind of them. The most popular for today is smart phones. With them you can search on webpages, take video calls, send or get data files, listen music or watch some movies.

For young people is most important that cell phone has a lot of function. They usualy using it for sms or playing games. Cell phone for them is like communication tool with friends end parents.

There is another group of people witch using mobile phone for work. They really don't care about functions of sell phone. The most important things for them is reliability end the battery life of phone. Ussualy they have a realy big paymens for they calls.

End the last group of people is like people witch using phone to communicate with frends, relatives. For them is not very importat to have a cell phone end they don't care about funcionality of phone, they just use calls to communicate.

The cell phone has slowly but surely become a integral part of our lives. The number of cellphone addicts are growing day by day. One important factor for this is the humble cellular phone battery, without which cellphones would be just another communications device.

Text messaging is popularly utilized by many as the easiest way for them to express what they truly feel.
Cell phones have become a great tool for people to socialize and increase their networks easily.
Cell phones became a tool for people to share news and stay updated with the most important events.
Cell phones made relationships extra special as the most inspiring messages are disseminated through test messaging.

Cell phones have undoubtedly changed the usual pace of life that people used to lead. Be open for changes and enjoy the benefits that usually come with the innovations that happen because for sure the only thing that would linger in this world are those that created immense improvements on the lives of people.

IM, Email and Social Networks All-in one (Digsby)

Computers and internet have been part of our everyday life for a long time and many of us have been born in the middle of this interactive media. We seek information and we share it actively. We use social media services to tell people what is up with our lives and we seek information about others. Information is sought to help make decisions and status updates are done to tell others how you feel and where you are going. The amount of information that´s out there is overwhelming and yet we feel we must be aware of everything what´s going on out there. Why we do it? Because knowledge is power and wherever there is interaction and exchange there is quality of mind – collective intelligence [1].

Digsby (www.digsby.com) is a little piece of software that tries to provide help with this information overload. It is a multiprotocol IM client that combines AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk and Jabber to one single buddy list. Not only does it handle all your IMs, it also handles your Email accounts (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP account) and even your Social Networking messages from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts [2]. Sounds cool? It actually is!

I don´t remember how and when I came up with Digsby, but I must say all has been easy since. I´m using it to follow all my non-work related Emails, my MSN IM and my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Going those through all separately would take ages, but with Digsby it is as easy as it gets.

[1] David Skrbina, Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview, http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/publications/doc_theses_links/d_skrbina.html, 2008, 296[2] Digsby, http://www.digsby.com, 2011

Faking Availability

John Tang discussed the importance of social cues for negotiating contact in computer-mediated communication [1]. In face-to-face situations, people use subtle social protocols and cues (e.g., gaze) to initiate and terminate conversations. Such cues are often poorly supported by computer-mediated communication tools. Recently, a common approach has been to provide automatic presence information to facilitate the initiation phase.

Tang recognizes that the social cues are also important for successfully avoiding conversations. For this purpose, automatic presence information can be overriden manually. For example, I can set my presence status to "away" if I'm not in the mood for conversations.

The problem with the manual presence status is that it is too explicit. It can be considered rude to have the presence status as "away" most of the time. In contrast, face-to-face situations allow more polite and graceful avoidance of conversations. Further, in face-to-face situations we can regulate our availability selectively - I might be available for some people but not for others.

The importance of faking availability was also discussed by Raento and Oulasvirta [2]. They listed ability to lie as one of their design principles for social awareness applications. This was also supported by Hancock et al. [3]. They conclude that lying is an important social practice for regulating conversation availability in instant messaging.

Feel free to discuss. Unless I'm busy.



[1] John C. Tang. 2007. Approaching and leave-taking: Negotiating contact in computer-mediated communication. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 14, 1, Article 5.
[2] Mika Raento and Antti Oulasvirta. 2008. Designing for privacy and self-presentation in social awareness. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 12, 7, pp. 527-542.
[3]  Jeff Hancock, Jeremy Birnholtz, Natalya Bazarova, Jamie Guillory, Josh Perlin, and Barrett Amos. 2009. Butler lies: awareness, deception and design. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '09), pp. 517-526.

Grounding constraints and using Skype's instant messenger in open office

I work in a company where we have an open office with almost 15 people in it. We used to talked all our work related things to each other from over where we sit, but that was easier when there were fever people in the office. Now the communication can get noisy if everyone talks to one or other over their place. To reduce conversation noices in open office, as one reason, we started using Skype's instant messaging. Many of us also listen to music while working and it's sometimes easier to get attention with Skype than by shouting to others from where you sit. We chose Skype's instant messenger mainly because it saves the posting history and that's good especially for those who work part time.

Some of Clark's and Brennan's constraints for grounding, that are presented in Monks paper [1], fit in our situation at work. Here I'm going to view more which grounding constraints and how do them appear in our communication situations at work while using Skype's instant messenger in an open office.

Reviewability is definetely one good aspect of Skype's instant messenger. It saves the message history and it is easier for those who work part time to keep on track about spoken topics. When the conversations aren't too long, reviewing is easier.

Revising the text is also possible. In instant messaging written text is usually quite short and in our situation conversations consists of short questions, answers and comments. It's still good that it's possible to check what you have written in a hurry.

As we work in an open office I think that copresence fits in our situation too. We share the same physical environment and we can see at least who is present in that environment. It's also possible to see if someone is for example talking on a phone and that way we know that answering in chat might take a while. What we can't know is that what's happening on others computer screen and if we use chat with someone who's in a meeting for example, we loose the copresence. Things that also weaken the copresence in my opinion are music listening (ear plugs on) and obstacles in the office like computer screen.

Visibility fits in our situation at work when I see a reaction of my co-worker who sits near me. But that is only when I know that the reaction is about the chat message and not about something else happening on his/her computer screen. If we all concentrate to our own screen, we have no visibility in the communication situation.

Because we use only text based instant messaging, there is no audibility in our communication. Yes, that's how it usually is while chatting, but many times we point out things from the chat discussion by speaking. For instance if nobody has answered to a question, I can ask it out loud. And if I send a document over chat, I can call out that "hey, I put the document to Skype" etc.

Clark and Brennan state that simultaneity isn't possible in other than face-to-face conversations. That's true in our situation too if we think of instant messaging. If someone sends a message in the chat, it takes I while to read it and internalize what the message is about. Contemporality falls in the same gategory in our situation, I think.

Instant messaging has problems in sequentiality section. Usually we send messages about same things, but sometimes there can be many ongoing topics in one chat. We usually try to add ones name in front of the comment to whom we answer. If I answer to some old comment I usually copy the comment to my message and answer after it. That way everyone (should) know what I'm talking about.

Skype doesn't replace our daily meetings and of course there are situations when someone asks or informs something by 'shouting' from his/her work station. Also there are lots of normal face-to-face conversations, I don't think working would be very fluent without them. So no, we don't have a quiet office even though we use Skype's instant messenger :). And that's good because even though it's easy to just sit down in one place and not go to and fro asking questions, I still prefer face-to-face conversations when I really need to sort something out.

References:
[1]Monk, A. (2009) Common ground in electronically mediated conversation. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics #1. Morgan & Claypool publishers. Available via Tamcat: link