PresenceScape: a 3D virtual world application to support social awareness and informal communication in distributed teams
11 February 2012
This paper presents a prototype evaluation of an innovative application called PresenceScape. This application is targeted towards distributed teams of knowledge workers and aimed to support social awareness and informal communication by means of a customized 3D virtual world environment. PresenceScape is able to capture real life events, translate them into virtual representation based on user-defined rules and finally visualize those interpreted events in a virtual world. During a nine-week period, a small distributed team of 13 knowledge workers tested a high fidelity prototype version of the PresenceScape application in their regular work context. User acceptation and implications for further design of the application are discussed. Results point to a positive evaluation of the virtual world visualization and identify user interaction and distraction as two major areas of improvement.
