Today, Phillip Jeffrey visited our lab in Lausanne. The point was to discuss potential avenues of collaboration with him and his group at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. One of the issue we raised is their future use of CatchBob! (yep they will re-use our CatchBob game their!). Some of the questions they want to tackle are really close to what we do; that's why I asked Philip if he could come visit us (taking advantage of the fact that he was at the European CSCW conference in Paris few days ago).
What's interesting is what they want to study (with regard to what we did/will do):
- What differences in collaboration and task success exist when location position is requested versus provided automatically? (eg. A player must hit a refresh button in order to receive location information versus the information being refreshed automatically)
- Do people employ different strategies for the "chase bob" (moving Bob) when compared to "Catch Bob!" tasks? How do strategies differ with location-awareness availability and obstacles within the environment?
- Does the type of communication used influence the level of collaboration and the usefulness of location-awareness?
- how does repeted play modify players'/groups' strategies?
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We also presented him what we're currently working on:
- management of uncertainties in CatchBob (latency, location accuracy, annotations, impacts on collaboration/task performance/division of labor, how this relates to players' preconceptions)
- impacts of location awareness on collaborative strategies in the different phases of the game
- usage of various 'coordination keys/devices' while collaborating
- analysis of strategy messages (so that we can have a 'grammar' of 'intention awareness' acts)
- impacts of asychronous awareness (showing players their partners' trails)
Finally, we agreed to collaborate on avrious issues: papers / data analysis / workshop.