Using Awareness to Adapt Working Group Environment: A Lightweight Virtual Awareness Card

International audienceWorking in a distributed workgroup is related immediately to the interaction support, different resources and collaborative tools operated by dispersed users. In another level, belonging to a groupware implies a heightened sense of awareness established in the groupware environment. We benefit from the different awareness information’s created in the workspace to present a new mechanism providing adaptability to the group environment. This mechanism is based on the concept of Virtual Awareness Card (VAC). It allows to different users, connected to the groupware environment with heterogeneous interaction supports, to provide an adequate workspace by exchanging properties information of the different software and hardware included and employed by the actors. The virtual card insures the adaptability of diverse sites involved in the Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) during synchronous and asynchronous sessions. We make use of three awareness directives to perform the VAC card’s data: Convenience Awareness, Preferential Awareness and Restrictive Awareness. In accordance with the different dynamic profiles information, actors can adapt their interactions and use of multimedia and collaborative tools during the work session. To show how the performance of virtual card can be improved, we implement the VAC exchange mechanism in a telemedicine application and we discuss its features by developing diverse testing scenarios to display more its integration in a collaborative virtual environment and benefits in term of bandwidth, exchanged information, and proportion of lost network packets within a distributed system