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The impact of ambient awareness on the temporal coordination of spatially dispersed teams

Subject Area Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
Term from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 412940801
 
Final Report Year 2022

Final Report Abstract

The development of an AR application for the temporal coordination of spatially dispersed teams and its empirical validation in experimental settings was to contribute empirical findings, knowledge and insights concerning design aspects, usability and empirically derived standards for the engineering and implementation of such systems in similar contexts of “Industrie 4.0”. We assumed that AR superimposition of critical process states of a (act-wait-act-wait) team task, that both team members are executing interdependently, leads to increased task state awareness and optimal temporal team coordination. We conducted three studies: 1) a pre study (within-group, N = 21) to derive the ambient awareness superimposition with the highest usability and user experience ratings based on a human-centered design fapproach, 2) an additional study (within group; N = 23) with an avatar-based teamwork assistance system and 3) the main study (N = 216) to test the effect of the ambient awareness tool (derived from pre study) in a 2x2 experimental between groups design. In the second study, we showed that an active avatar (that points to relevant aspects of the team task) has a positive impact on perceived co-presence and social presence. Additionally, we could replicate the finding, that the previously developed gaze guiding tool reduced possible performance errors down to almost zero. The third (main) study was implemented using a distributed and heterogeneous hard- and software setup. This setup builds up on model-based descriptions of system states and SOPs, which showed the applicability of such descriptions for the implementation of Gaze Guiding and Task State Awareness tools. It also demonstrates the feasibility of a distributed system setup, which combines process simulations, AR superimpositions as well as mobile hardware for the investigation of temporal coordination in interdependent team tasks. The results of the study so far showed a main effect of the task (individual or team task), independent of the manipulated superimposition (2D versus 2,5D and static versus dynamic). All teams produced less output, needed longer than the individuals to perform the start-up and were less conscientious in the monitoring task (a prospective memory task which indicates a higher mental workload in the team coordination). That means, that the temporal coordination was a real challenge for executing a task together, that was successfully executed alone. As almost no errors were made (due to the gaze guiding superimposition) in both groups (less than 1). We originally hypothesized that we can “smooth” the temporal coordination by means of the Ambient Awareness Tool (derived in the pre-study) by increasing the task state awareness, but that was not the case. One reason can be that the Ambient Awareness Tool was too ambient to be of assistance and to be of additional use in comparison to the (already highly effective) gaze guiding tool. AR sickness or other health related variables did not affect performance and proved to be of no relevance in the AR setting. Additional analyses are in progress due to the careful compilation and aggregation of different data sources e.g., logfiles analysis that is still ongoing. The data will be later available on osf.io.

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