COLLABORATING WITH DELAY - A DESIGN EFFORT DEALING WITH LATENCY AND JITTER IN A REALTIME COLLABORATIVE SYSTEM

Abstract

This paper will outline a design and development effort where real-time collaboration using web technologies to create an online whiteboard is explored. The aim of this paper is to study how network issues such as latency and jitter affect a collaboration and explore how to design a real-time collaborative web application taking into account network performance issues. The specific focus of this paper is on the “telepointer” a design pattern where co-present users’ attention is visualized within the system. The result shows that the telepointer is not an ideal solution to visualize the attention of co-present users, as low-quality network connections makes the telepointer lag substantially making coordination of the activity difficult. Using alternative visualizations such as halos visualizing where the attention of co-present users are is a more promising approach but needs finetuning of algorithms in order to work.