Evaluating the effectiveness of communication media on remote collaboration

Different institutions worldwide, such as economic, social and political, are relying increasingly on the communication technology to perform a variety of functions: holding remote business meetings, discussing design issues in product development, enabling consumers to remain connected with their families and children, and so on. In this environment, where geographic and temporal boundaries are shrinking rapidly, electronic communication medium are playing an important role. With recent advances in 3D sensing, computing on new hardware platforms, high bandwidth communication connectivity and 3D display technology, the vision of 3D video-teleconferencing and of tele-immersive experience has become very attractive. These advances lead to tele-immersive communication systems that enable 3D interactive experience in a virtual space consisting of objects born in physical and virtual environments. This experience is achieved by fusing real-time color plus depth video of physical scenes from multiple stereo cameras located at different geographic sites, displaying 3D reconstructions of physical and virtual objects, and performing computations to facilitate interactions between objects. While tele-immersive (TI) systems have been attracting a lot of attention these days, the advantages of enabled interactions and delivered 3D content for viewing as opposed to current 2D high definition video have not been evaluated. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of three different types of communication media on remote collaboration in order to document the pros and cons of new technologies such as TI. The three communication media include 3D video tele-immersive, 2D video Skype and face-to-face used in a collaborative environment of a remote product development scenario. Through a study done over 90 subjects, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different media and propose a scope for improvement in each of them.