The Use of Visual Information in Shared Visual Spaces: Informing the Development of Virtual Co-Presence

A shared visual workspace is one where multiple people can see the same objects at roughly the same time. We present findings from an experiment investigating the effects of shared visual space on a collaborative puzzle task. We show that having the shared visual space helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. These processes are associated with faster and better task performance. Delaying the visual update in the space reduces benefits and degrades performance. The shared visual space is more useful when tasks are visually complex or when actors have no simple vocabulary for describing their world. We find evidence for the ways in which participants adapt their discourse processes to their level of shared visual information.