Attention and Engagement of Remote Team Members in Collaborative Multimedia Environments

An important aspect in multimedia computer mediated collaboration is to sustain the attention and engagement of remote participants during project meetings. This paper presents preliminary findings of a comparative study of two types of collaborative multimedia environments (ICT) — Webconferencing with application sharing and 3D Team Neighborhood virtual world - by evaluating the syntactic levels of micro-awareness that consist of locus of attention and attention span. These metrics provide insights into what key ICT interaction characteristics and how people attend to content presented through a collaboration interface will generate awareness, establish and sustain attention and engagement of remote participants. We used the 2009–2010 “Architecture, Engineering, construction Global Teamwork” program as the testbed. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected through field observation and EyeTracker data. Preliminary results show that meetings held in the 3D Team Neighborhood kept participants' attention 24% more time on screen vs. meetings held in Webconference with application sharing. In addition, multitasking was the typical behavior during Webconference with application sharing, whereas none or minimal multitasking was observed in the 3D Team Neighborhood.