Social Presence Awareness Visualization in a Collaborative Videogame

Abstract

The awareness information in collaborative systems supports the interaction between people. However, traditional awareness systems are limited to mechanisms that display data often isolated from the context of social interaction and do not fully reflect the individual relevance of a person (social presence) in the collaborative activity. Therefore, proposing more dynamic and efficient tools to facilitate the acquisition and presentation of social presence information is convenient. This research proposes a social presence visualization system and its conceptual architecture and develops a user-centered prototype. The prototype integrates functions that let the user select different representations of social presence (pictogram, bar chart, donut chart, and radial). We used the prototype in a collaborative video game (AssaultCube-CX) to study the effects of social presence visualization on users’ performance. We studied the social presence of 12 Mexican volunteers by recording their activities during the tests to analyze their social presence. The social presence quantitative analysis indicates that the visualization of social presence during the collaborative activity increase awareness of social presence and improves team performance in most cases.