The Open Software Engineering Journal, 2012, 6, 1-20 1 1874-107X/12 2012 Bentham Open Open Access The Impact of Collaborative Style on the Perception of 2D and 3D Videoconferencing Interfaces Joerg Hauber 1 , Holger Regenbrecht 2, *, Andy Cockburn 3 and Mark Billinghurst 1 1 HITLabNZ, Christchurch, New Zealand 2 University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand 3 University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Abstract: Video-based collaborative virtual environments (CVE) attempt to emulate face-to-face meetings by immersing remote collaborators in a shared 3D virtual setting. To investigate potential advantages of this novel type of collaborative user interfaces for creating a better sense of social presence and affording a more efficient collaborative process we con- ducted an empirical study in which pairs of users solved a simple task (matching a set of celebrity photos with a set of quotes) using four different media: face-to-face, a standard desktop videoconferencing system (VC), a desktop video- CVE, and a stereo large-screen video-CVE. As expected, results showed that face-to-face provided a significantly stronger sense of social presence than any of the systems, but relatively little differences showed between the systems themselves. However, significant gender effects emerged in an ex-post analysis for the different system types, with females perceiving more social presence when using the standard video conferencing environment and less with the video-CVE conditions, while males showed the opposite effect. Linguistic analysis of audio transcriptions and video analysis further illuminates differences between collaboration styles of males and females across the collaborative conditions. We discuss the implica- tions of our findings for future studies into CVEs and video conferencing systems. Keywords: Social presence, gender, spatiality, collaborative virtual environments, video-mediated communication, teleconferencing. 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of real-time telecommunication media is to col- lapse the space between geographically dispersed groups and create the illusion that people are together, when in fact they are not. In this context, modern video-conferencing technol- ogy is commonly used to connect remote people who want to talk, work, or learn with each other. Video offers a visual communication channel that conveys several non-verbal communication cues such as facial expressions and gestures, which are absent in normal telephone calls. Still, compared to being face-to-face, video-communication feels cold, im- personal, unsociable, and insensitive [1], raising the question how it can be improved. One shortcoming of video conferencing, compared to face-to-face collaboration, is the absence of a shared 3D frame of reference between the participants which reduces the sense of collocation, decreases gaze awareness, and thus may impede the establishment of a common collaborative context (see Fig. (1), standard VC). Video-collaborative virtual environments (video-CVEs) are novel Video Mediated Communication (VMC) interfaces which seek to address these problems by re-introducing a virtual 3D context into which distant participants are men- *Address correspondence to this author at the University of Otago, Informa- tion Science, P.O. Box 56, 9054 Dunedin / New Zealand; Tel: ++64 (0)3 479 8322; Fax: ++64 (0)3 479 8311; Email: holger.regenbrecht@otago.ac.nz tally transported. Fig. (1) schematically depicts a video- CVE, seen from a 3rd person perspective. As can be seen in Fig. (1), users are represented by their own avatars through which they can then interact with the shared environment and with each other. Although working prototypes of video-CVEs have dem- onstrated their technical feasibility, research into the value of video-CVEs for supporting remote collaboration is still in its infancy. In this article we present a study that explores how users collaborate within video-CVEs by directly comparing collaborative processes and user perceptions when mediated by four conditions: two video-CVEs systems, a standard video conferencing system, and a face-to-face condition. With this study we contribute to a better understanding of human factors in video-CVEs. Our work is significant, be- cause it ties the area of collaborative virtual environments to the empirical body of classical cross-media comparisons found in HCI literature. a) Standard VC b) Video-CVE Fig. (1). Interface approaches to videoconferencing.