Abstract
It is well known that the arrangement of humans and objects plays an important role in everyday human communication. Thus it is conceivable that in video-mediated communication such importance will be preserved: especially when it comes to the spatial arrangement of body parts. We used this observation as a hypothesis to implement a remote collaboration system.
For this paper, the optimal arrangement of communication resources for an education system to support collaborative learning, including hand-manipulation of physical objects was empirically investigated. The authors propose a ‘body metaphor’ concept as an initial design guideline. It follows the ordinary arrangement of human bodies and objects in normal instruction. Comparative experiments revealed that the body metaphor setting supported smoother collaboration than the conventional face-to-face metaphor setting.
More detailed ethnomethodological analysis of the collaboration in the body metaphor setting following the comparative experiments also pointed to advantages of the ‘body metaphor’ concept. In particular when an instructor started and continued an instruction, the body metaphor setting provided important resources not only for the instructor but also for the operators to organize the situation of instruction.
In the last section, remaining problems of the current ‘body metaphor’ implementation and authors' several current efforts for them are explained.
