Perspectives: Creating Inclusive and Equitable Hybrid Meeting Experiences

Authors: John Tang, Kori Inkpen, Sasa Junuzovic, Keri Mallari, Andrew D. Wilson, Sean Rintel, Shiraz Cupala, Tony Carbary, Abigail Sellen, Bill Buxton
Venue: CSCW 2023
Free from the publisher

AThe study

Experiment with 60 people, mostly employees of the authors' company, in 12 groups of five colleagues, two in a conference room and three remote. Every group used all four layouts in counterbalanced order, in sessions of 90 to 110 minutes.

What people in the room sawWhat remote people sawEnd of session Galleryall 60 people A grid of video tiles A grid of video tiles End of session: rankingEach person ranked the four layouts Together Modeall 60 people Everyone in one shared scene The same shared scene, the same view for all Front Rowall 60 people Remote people along the bottom of the display A grid of video tiles Perspectivesall 60 people A virtual room extending their own, life size on the wall The same room from their own seat at the table

BThe system

  1. Seat everyone at one tableEveryone is placed in one virtual meeting room around a semi-circular table, with backgrounds removed from remote video.
  2. Extend the roomPeople in the conference room see the virtual room projected life size on the wall, as an extension of their own room.
  3. Give each person a seatEach remote person sees the room from their own seat, so everyone keeps the same place whoever is looking.
  4. Capture people one by oneEach person in the room has their own webcam and head-worn microphone, so the system can place them individually.
  5. Place the voicesVoices come from where each person appears, through spatial audio in the room and headsets for remote people.

No one sees a video of themselves. The three other layouts were rebuilt on the same platform, and spatial audio was valued in every layout.

CWhat changed

Preferencerankings at the end of each session

  • ↑Perspectives: ranked highest of the four layouts, with Gallery ranked lowest.Of 60 people, 29 ranked Perspectives first, read from a chart. A reliable effect of layout on rankings, p < .01.
  • Perspectives: remote people rated it negatively more often, 28% against 12% in the room.Some remote people missed seeing themselves and felt seated across the table from the group, as if presenting to it.

Sense of spacesurvey ratings, memory and timing after each layout, compared with Gallery

  • ↑Perspectives: people in the room reported feeling more in the same space than with Gallery.Self-reported co-presence on a 1 to 5 scale, 3.83 against 2.21. Remote people reported the same for Perspectives and Together Mode.
  • ↑Perspectives: people made fewer errors sketching from memory who sat where.Fewer errors than after any other layout, p = .05. The authors read this as an easier mental model of the room.
  • ↑Perspectives: rounds of counting off to 30 took less time than with Gallery.A warm-up turn-taking task, also faster than with Together Mode. The authors used the timing as a measure of mental effort.

↑ better than with Gallery ↓ worse – no reliable difference

DKey takeaway

Hybrid meetings can gain spatiality when room and remote attendees are composited into one shared scene, with consistent seats and a first-person view for each. Designs may need tuning for remote people, who can feel set apart.

Made for this site with AI assistance from the verified research brief. It is not the paper's own figure.

Abstract

With the shift to hybrid meetings in work spaces, there is an increasing need to create a more inclusive hybrid meeting experience where people meeting together in a room interact with those joining remotely. This paper describes a design exploration, implementation, and evaluation of Perspectives, a novel hybrid meeting system that aimed to create an inclusive and equitable space for hybrid meetings. Perspectives digitally composites everyone into a virtual room so that each person has a unique but spatially consistent viewpoint into the meeting. The user study compared Perspectives with three commercially available UX designs for hybrid meetings: Gallery, Together Mode, and Front Row. Results from this study revealed key benefits of Perspectives, including supporting natural interactions, creating a strong sense of co-presence, and reducing cognitive load. Results from the study also helped iterate on the design principles of Perspectives, which offer important insights on supporting hybrid meetings.

Research brief

By John Tang, Kori Inkpen, Sasa Junuzovic, Keri Mallari, Andrew D. Wilson, Sean Rintel, Shiraz Cupala, Tony Carbary, Abigail Sellen, and Bill Buxton.

Takeaway: Hybrid meetings can feel more like one shared space when people appear together in one scene rather than a grid of video tiles. Seating everyone around one virtual table, with fixed places and each person's own view of the room, was preferred, though less so by remote attendees.

Why this matters

What was known
Hybrid meetings tend to form in-groups in the room that sideline remote participants. Earlier spatial systems needed matching, expensive rooms or special hardware, and common video layouts give no consistent sense of who is where. These studies all show how the structural asymmetry of being in the room versus joining remotely creates differences in group dynamics that need to be addressed to enable equitable participation in the hybrid context. (§2.1, p. 3)
What this paper adds
Three design principles for inclusive hybrid meetings, realised with ordinary cameras, microphones and displays rather than matched rooms or special hardware. They are tested against three commercial layouts with groups of colleagues split between a meeting room and remote desks. blending rather than separating in-room and remote users; consistency in the spatial arrangement of people to give everyone a 'seat at the table'; and first-person perspective view (§1, p. 2)
Who it matters to
Designers of video meeting tools and hybrid meeting layouts, including commercial products, and organisations that want remote colleagues included. we have an opportunity to modify the designs of our current video meeting tools to create a more satisfying hybrid meeting experience (§9, p. 22)

Research question

Method and data

Design
Mixed-design user study: layout condition (Gallery, Together Mode, Front Row, Perspectives) within subjects, in-room versus remote between subjects, and Latin square counterbalancing repeated three times.
Prototype
Perspectives, a hybrid meeting system that places everyone in one virtual meeting room around a semi-circular table. People in the conference room see the virtual room projected life-size on the wall as an extension of their own room, with the remote participants' videos (backgrounds removed) seated around the table. Each remote participant sees the same room, with wall art, plants and doorways as landmarks, from their own seat at the table, so everyone keeps the same place whoever is looking. No one sees a video of themselves. Voices come from where each person appears, through a Dolby Atmos system in the room and headsets for remote participants. Each person in the room has their own webcam and head-worn microphone so they can be placed individually. Built as a Unity application using Microsoft Teams video streams. Compared with three Microsoft Teams layouts rebuilt on the same platform: Gallery (a grid of videos), Together Mode (everyone in one shared scene, all seeing the same view) and Front Row (remote people along the bottom of the room display, while remote people see a grid).
People at a meeting-room table facing a large wall display that shows a shared virtual room, with remote participants seated around a curved table.
Fig. 1. The Perspectives prototype UX for those gathered together in the meeting room From the paper, Figure 1, p. 2.
Setting
Simulated hybrid meetings. In each group of five people who knew each other, two sat in a conference room with a projected display and spatial audio, and three joined from separate offices set up as home workspaces. Groups did warm-up tasks (counting off to 30, an ice-breaker) and a five-minute group decision task in each condition.
Participants / data
60 participants in 12 groups, mostly employees of the authors' company because of COVID protocols. 56.7% man and 43.3% woman.
Duration
Each session took between 90 and 110 minutes.
Analysis
Post-condition surveys (co-presence, perceived effort and other Likert items), a layout-sketching task and timing of the counting task as measures of cognitive load, final preference rankings, analysed with Aligned Rank Transform and repeated measures ANOVA. Thematic analysis of group interviews.

Findings

Questions this paper answers

Why does a grid of video tiles make meetings feel disconnected?
A grid gives no consistent sense of where anyone is, because the tiles are arranged differently on each person's screen. In simulated hybrid meetings, a shared scene made people feel more in the same space. A fixed seating plan made the group easier to follow. (See §6.1, p. 14; §6.2, p. 17.)
Does a consistent seating plan matter in video meetings?
It seemed to. When everyone kept the same place around one table, seen from their own seat, people sketched the group's layout from memory with fewer errors. They also took turns around the table faster, suggesting a clearer mental picture of the group and possibly lower mental effort. (See §6.3, p. 18; §6.3, p. 18.)
Should video calls stop showing you your own image?
Opinions split. Some found no self view more natural and less distracting. Others, especially people joining remotely, missed it and wanted reassurance about how they appeared. People in the room missed it less, perhaps because sharing a room made them feel properly seen and heard. (See §6.1, p. 15.)
Does a hybrid meeting design work equally well for people in the room and remote?
Not always. Many benefits were stronger in the conference room, where the virtual table extended the real one. People joining remotely were more negative about the same design, missing their self view and feeling seated across from the group rather than among it. (See §6.1, p. 14; §6.1, p. 15.)

Quantitative results

MeasureResultWhere
Preference ranking: main effect of conditionF3,174 = 5.87, p < .01§6.1, p. 14
Preference ranking: condition × in-room/remote interactionF3,174 = 3.69, p = .01§6.1, p. 14
Ranked Perspectives first; first or second (of 60 participants)48% (29 of 60) first; 60% (36 of 60) first or secondFig. 4, p. 14
Fig. 4 (read from bars)
Rated Gallery last38% of participants§6.1, p. 14
Rated Perspectives negatively, remote vs in-room28% vs 12%§6.1, p. 15
Co-presence: main effect of conditionF3,174 = 15.99, p < .001§6.2, p. 16
Mean co-presence rating (1-5), in-room: Perspectives vs Gallery3.83 vs 2.21Table 4, p. 17
Sketch errors: main effect of conditionF3,177 = 2.62, p = .05§6.3, p. 18
Counting task round time: main effect of conditionF3,217, 5.16, p < .01§6.3, p. 18

Contributions and implications

Limitations

›

Concepts

Digital compositing
Placing in-room and remote participants' video together in one virtual meeting room, which extends the physical room for those in it. Perspectives digitally composites everyone into a virtual room so that each person has a unique but spatially consistent viewpoint into the meeting. (Abstract, p. 1)
Consistent spatial layout
Every participant has a fixed place that is the same for everyone in the meeting. if Alice is seated to the right of Bob, then everyone in the meeting sees Alice on Bob's right (§3.2, p. 7)
First-person perspective
The third design principle: Rather than give everyone the same view into the meeting, we explored giving each person their own viewpoint into the common space, as they might have when sitting in a room together. (§3.3, pp. 7–8)
Video preview (self view)
The image of yourself shown in most video calls, which Perspectives removed. it is inconsistent with our interactions in the physical world where we do not also see of mirror of ourselves when talking with others (§3.3.1, pp. 7–8)

Figures

Stacked bar chart of how 60 participants ranked each layout from 1 to 7. Perspectives has the most first-place ranks. Gallery has the most last-place ranks. Together Mode and Front Row fall between.
Fig. 4. Rank ordered preference of each condition from 1 (most preferred) to 7 (least preferred) From the paper, Fig. 4, p. 14.
Stacked bars of positive (1-2), neutral and negative (6-7) rankings per layout for in-room and remote participants. Perspectives is mostly positive in both. 28% of remote and 12% of in-room participants rated it negatively.
Fig. 5. Preference rankings for each condition according to being in the room or remote From the paper, Fig. 5, p. 15.
People at a meeting-room table facing a large wall display that shows a shared virtual room, with remote participants seated around a curved table.
Fig. 1. The Perspectives prototype UX for those gathered together in the meeting room From the paper, Figure 1, p. 2.

How to cite

John Tang, Kori Inkpen, Sasa Junuzovic, Keri Mallari, Andrew D. Wilson, Sean Rintel, Shiraz Cupala, Tony Carbary, Abigail Sellen, and Bill Buxton. 2023. Perspectives: Creating Inclusive and Equitable Hybrid Meeting Experiences. CSCW 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610200

This brief was prepared with AI assistance and published by Sean Rintel. It is not the authors' published text. Page numbers refer to this PDF.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{tang2023perspectives,
author = {Tang, John and Inkpen, Kori and Junuzovic, Sasa and Mallari, Keri and Wilson, Andrew D. and Rintel, Sean and Cupala, Shiraz and Carbary, Tony and Sellen, Abigail and Buxton, Bill},
title = {Perspectives: Creating Inclusive and Equitable Hybrid Meeting Experiences},
booktitle = {CSCW 2023},
year = {2023},
month = {October},
publisher = {ACM},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3610200},
doi = {10.1145/3610200},
}