Participants’ Attention Level in Remote Collaboration Tasks

Abstract

This thesis aims at studying participants’ attention level in remote collaboration tasks. The study focused on gaining insights on certain Remote Collaboration challenges that are commonly faced nowadays due to lack of communication cues. A research experiment study was conducted to address the focus area of the thesis. Two sessions of same experiment were conducted each comprising of 3 participants from Tampere University. At the beginning of the experiment, a lecture on Social Entrepreneurship was played among Participants, after which they were asked to perform a collaboration task on shared virtual environment called Mural board based on the topics from video lecture. ETU driver was used to collect Mouse Tracking data of each participant to plot their mouse movements against certain working areas at specific timestamps.

The study found that in most of the cases, participants’ mouse movements were in alignment with the working areas of a task in the Workspace. However, certain differences were also observed due to different mouse movement behaviour of participants such as the one where a particular participant would try to comprehend all the information that are present in the screen using the mouse instead of performing an action. Hence it is not conclusive to the idea of measuring Participant’s Attention level solely based on Mouse movements due to different mouse movement behaviours.

This thesis focused to understand if participant’s can put their attention to the relevant areas where other collaborators are working. The results from this study may help to pave the way for further development of Remote Collaboration tools for better results. In summary, this study aimed to address the dawning concept of Remote Collaboration to provide insights on Participants attention level during the collaboration work.