Human-centered collaborative interaction

Recent years have witnessed an increasing shift in interest from single user multimedia/multimodal interfaces towards support for interaction among groups of people working closely together, e.g. during meetings or problem solving sessions. However, the introduction of technology to support collaborative practices has not been devoid of problems. It is not uncommon that technology meant to support collaboration may introduce disruptions and reduce group effectiveness.Human-centered multimedia and multimodal approaches hold a promise of providing substantially enhanced user experiences by focusing attention on human perceptual and motor capabilities, and on actual user practices. In this paper we examine the problem of providing effective support for collaboration, focusing on the role of human-centered approaches that take advantage of multimodality and multimedia. We show illustrative examples that demonstrate human-centered multimodal and multimedia solutions that provide mechanisms for dealing with the intrinsic complexity of human-human interaction support.