Catching the eye

Abstract

In this paper, we show how different elements of awareness information in groupware systems can be defined in terms of conveying attentive states of the participants. Different kinds of awareness are distinguished: at macro- and micro-level, the latter consisting of workspace awareness and conversational awareness. We summarize the functional elements of micro-level awareness, organizing them hierarchically in terms of their relation to the attention of participants. We further discuss how groupware systems can capture and represent awareness by means of attention-based metaphors, and give an example of a virtual meeting room in which the gaze direction of the participants is conveyed by means of modern ‘imaging’ eyetracking technology