Mobile social mirrors study

Studies have shown that real time collaborative visualizations that are designed to augment a group activity prove to be helpful to participants in general. Visualizations projected on large tabletops or walls that reflect a social mirror affects group dynamics and encourages balanced participation. Our research takes a step forward to see if the visualization on handheld devices can have the same effect as on large tabletops. In specific, we are interested in seeing how visualization on small screens can affect conversation dynamics. We present VizCall, an Android application that can augment both co-located and distributed group conversations using a real-time interactive synchronized distributed visualization. VizCall can achieve near perfect synchronization of the distributed visualization and can accommodate network delay and jitter gracefully. Using a 2-tier and 3-tier client server model approach with a way to load balance the system by dynamically selecting server node and a simple technique to accommodate delays and jitter, we show how we can synchronize a visualization application running on 4 different mobile phones with participants from United States and India. We also present the results of an ABAB user study performed to see the effect of the Conversation Clocks visualization on group dynamics in a social group discussion scenario. The results show that visualization on handhelds prove to be helpful to participants as on large tabletops. Also, although a clear effect of visualization on total participation level and total dominance level of the participants was seen on both days of user study (no clear co-relation with total number of turns was found for day 1), this study did not show trends towards balanced participation between the conversation members