Video games come to the boardroom
New web conferencing tools use avatars and 3D gaming graphics to mimic face
to face meetings.
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of July 1, 2004.
A couple of weeks ago I spent two enjoyable hours talking to a group of colleagues in a state-of-the-art meeting centre. Most of the meeting rooms were fully equipped with whiteboards, video and PowerPoint screens. Some of us dispersed into smaller meeting rooms while others hung out in the hall. There was a fair amount of giggling. At one point a few of us got trapped in a room with a door that wouldn't open, so our facilitator deleted the room until he could fix the door. The whole building was a virtual construct, and each of us was represented by a cartoon that could walk, sit, wave and move from room to room.
This inexpensive new service, called SmartMeeting,
uses video gaming techniques to emulate a productive meeting space. It was
developed by a small company in Iceland whose software has been used by Ericsson,
BBC, Orange and other major European companies. The service is designed to
work with low bandwidth internet access, including dialup connections, and
includes good quality voice conferencing. In fact, the voice quality is one
of the most interesting things about it. The voice was three dimensional.
I could tell that Robin Good was talking on my right because his voice was
mainly on the right side of my headset. When we went out into the hall we
could faintly hear the conversation in the nearby meeting room unless they
shut the door. We had a mental model of small group breakouts so that people
could split up without 'disappearing' from the mindspace of their colleagues.
Participants in this meeting were from Iceland, Rome, Boston, Toronto, Munich
and a few other places.
I'm sure that many similar services will be popping up soon. But what good are they? The concept is kind of corny. In some ways it provides some of the disadvantages of face to face meetings, in that people need time to enter the room, choose chairs, socialize, get distracted, move around the room, go into the hall for a break, and so on. It also requires several minutes to get used to the space, as well as some personal help for the inevitable technical problems. Waste of time! On the other hand, that interaction gave us an eerie feeling of 'being there'. Something about the experience emulates something about the reality of face to face contact. Most people will find SmartMeeting too cumbersome until it gets easier to use. However, it's a glimpse of the future.
The knottiest questions about distance collaboration concern how to replace or emulate the important elements of face to face communication. Three major elements are facial expressions, interruptability and ease of use.
1. The first element is facial expression and other visual cues that help
you engage with the other people in the meeting. Microsoft Research published
a study in 2001 that examined how to improve the feeling of social engagement
in teleconferences by using simple computer graphics. The researchers showed
that simple cartoons that give hints as to human eye contact significantly
increased participants' engagement in teleconferences.
Faces are extraordinarily meaningful to humans. For example, "Chernoff
Faces" are simple cartoon graphics that assign facial expressions to mathematical
expressions, thereby helping people to understand complex mathematical relationships.
In a company's financial statements a smile might mean a profit and a frown
might mean a loss, with worried eyebrows meaning small financial reserves. A
1996
study by Smith et al (in pdf format) showed that such simple faces could
communicate highly complex financial information to both experts and nonexperts
compared to the usual tables of numbers. We're designed to 'read' faces. (Unfortunately,
the academic paper describing this research contains no cartoons - and what's
the use, as Alice might have pointed out, of a paper without pictures or conversation?)
Web conferences should introduce cues that help people be more engaged by using
our built-in signals of social interaction.
2. The second element is "interruptability" or "real-time open channels", as
Ray Ozzie
described it in a
web conference this week hosted by the inimitable Robin Good. Presence awareness
(telling coworkers when you're at your computer) and peripheral hearing (being
aware of what other people in your team are doing) are related concepts. In
intense interactions like brainstorming and problem-solving, you have to be
able to tell whether your coworkers are paying attention to you (are they picking
up their email while they pretend to be in the meeting?), you have to be able
to 'keep an ear out' for interesting or important conversations while you're
working on other tasks, you have to be able to interrupt colleagues with urgent
questions, you have to be able to hang out and brainstorm without worrying about
long distance costs, and so on. The intensity is defined by the density and
openness of communication on both sides. Instant Messaging is growing rapidly
in corporations even when it's against the rules because IM can deliver many
of these functions. In face to face meetings you can grab smaller groups of
people during the breaks or pass notes back and forth. IM can do the same thing
during teleconferences.
3. The third element is ease of use, which includes technical accessibility
(e.g., everyone having computers and internet access) but also includes the
development of social norms that are appropriate to the communication channel.
Teleconferences should be run differently from face-to-face meetings to take
account for the absence of visual cues, which is why it's so unsatisfying to
be teleconferenced into a meeting where most participants are sitting together.
A Boeing study of web
conferences (in PDF format) suggests that 'technology drivers' (meeting facilitators who
help participants with technical problems and encourage them to be active) are
vital to the success of distance meetings. And from our own experience it's
also important to have a backup plan in case the planned technology doesn't
work. For example, a facilitator should be reachable by mobile phone by latecomers
who can't figure out how to join the meeting.
Nonprofits experimenting with distance collaboration must come to terms with the
human need for more intense interaction than can be provided through email or
teleconferencing. The need for efficiency and geographic diversity demands it
for agencies with large catchment areas (e.g., national or state/province-wide).
After many years of using teleconferences I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion
that some visual connection is necessary for building relationships and team
trust for groups that are larger than about five people.
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Below is a screenshot of SmartMeeting's main meeting room, with my avatar. It looks sort of like me, but thinner. You can also see a breakout area in the background; there are several separate meeting rooms elsewhere in the virtual building.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
