West Portal Reflections #13, January 11, 1998
West Portal Director of the MSU Communication Technology Laboratory
West Portal Reflections document my experiences as I try to open a portal to Northern California for Michigan State University. They are targeted to my teams in the Comm Tech Lab and Virtual University, to my close colleagues and bosses throughout Michigan State University, and to close friends and family. These pages serve as ethnographic documentation of my participant-observation research on TeleRelating ("using technology to sustain and enhance close personal relationships"). The contents mix professional and personal life because I am reaching out 2500 miles to people I care about and work with. I hope my reflections help you to keep me in your hearts and make San Francisco a place that is yours. Thanks for journeying with me as I think, learn and experiment.
Visitors to West Portal
The guest book of West Portal visitors continues to grow. Brad Greenberg is shown pointing to my unusually clean office (don't worry, it's a disaster again). My sister Chris spent the night in SF on her way home from Hawaii. I met Kristi Nowak at the SF airport for lunch last Sunday. And took Lynn Rampoldi and husband Jay to lunch in West Portal yesterday. Later this month, Dean Jim, Doug Gordin and Darcy will be in SF on business. Frank and Zena will show up in February, as will my mother.
On Friday before the holidays, Pericles Gomes and I both attended the Comm Tech Lab holiday potluck by telephone. I was on the U.S. Robotics teleconferencing system on one side of the room, and he was on the AT&T picturephone/speakerphone on the other side of the room. Live people were sandwiched in between. (The image below was grabbed off the WebCam...)
I could talk to Pericles, but I had to yell across the room to him. Although both of us were virtual, we each had our own location in the room. The experience was much different than if he and I had be conferenced onto a single phone line. It was much better. I believe audio conferencing and video conferencing would benefit from adding a spatialization to participants. I propose a diagram of participants as if at a table, with participants' sound appearing to come from their location in the virtual room. Really made a difference. I could feel that Pericles was further away than the people in the room. The people in the room could clearly tell they were conversing with two distinct presences. (OK, one was flamboyant, fun and had a Brasilian accent and the other was kind of quiet and told people what to do.)
Randy described it as being surrounded by two "bubble brains."
I have been dreading the addition of video to my telecommuting and indeed in some ways it was as bad as I feared. The first day we got ViaTV fired up, Sanna and Andy in the CTL and I in West Portal spent about an hour just looking at each other and remarking how cool it was to be able to really see each other. On the webcam people look a lot like ants, and facial expressions are not visible. With ViaTV I could actually see when Sanna smiled and Andy smirked. We had the VU staff meeting the next day and it was interesting to be able to see people. Some people. The ones the camera was pointed at. I was able to see Randy yawning. Then on Friday I "attended" my first CTL potluck via ViaTV. The CTL had run the video into the large screen TV and ran my audio over the TV speakers so when I talked it boomed out over the room. I had to get up early and take a shower and get dressed instead of just dragging downstairs and answering the telephone in time for potluck. I felt self conscious and intruded upon, and it was horrible to know my image was so large and things I said were broadcast. Friends tried to engage me in conversation and I could hardly respond. Jesse later described watching me sink lower and lower and finally I just walked out of view of the camera completely, hanging up about 5 minutes later.
Obviously as a researcher studying telerelating, I knew I could not just break the camera and stop using video, much as I would like to. I thought about it and decided part of why it felt so intrusive was because I spent too much of my life sitting in the same chair all the time. ViaTV made me feel even more pinned to the chair and it intruded upon what had been my private space for 6 months. I decided to set up a "conferencing area" out in the main basement area, where I would "go" for meetings. The photos below show the setup. So far having a separate conference room has helped me feel better about using ViaTV. I also framed myself in a fairly wide shot to be parallel to how closeup the cameras at VU and CTL are. When I'm closeup and they are on wide shot, I feel too exposed.
I set up the system so I can playback videotape and sent Casio digital stills in place of live shots of me, when needed. Always? : )
I find myself engaging in exaggerated visual gestures because I know the frame rate is slow and the image is small. When I listen to coworkers and want to communicate approval and encouragement, I give a huge long smile rather than a normal short one. It is too much of an intrusion to ask people on site to move the camera to point at whoever is talking all the time, so sometimes I am seeing people who are not talking while not seeing the person who is talking. Still, it looks to them like I am looking at them. Realizing this, I pretend I am seeing them and concentrate on sending them appropriate facial expressions.
Not surprisingly, I find the video dimension to be distracting. In situations where my main job is to give feedback and listen, the video is good. But if I am presenting or trying to persuade or concentrate (hmmm, strange pair of goals to group), I would prefer audio so I can focus all of my attention on the audio and conceptual content space of what is going on. Will be interesting to see what happens with class.
Two other curious observations -- The camera tends to be located not at in the same position as a chair at a table, but further back to give a broader view of the table. I tend to see the backs of one or more person's heads, much closer than one would normally stand. When these people are talking to me, I still see the back of their head. Going back to the theme of seeing someone other than who is talking, this turns out to be a variation on the theme of first person/cinema verity technique. But instead of seeing the point of view of the character, you go through life observing the character's reactions to what is happening around them, instead of seeing what is happening. (Sounds like a (boring) movie idea to me.)
Meeting with Brian we felt the need for a whiteboard/shared space. We tried the whiteboard in Apple VideoPhone. Like the other whiteboards I am familiar with, it was clunky, slow and inconvenient. Sharing a word processor over Timbuktu would have been better. We started out with the beginning of an outline (Individual Webcams) but the conversation went so much faster than the whiteboard that we ended up randomly drawing silly things, adding to the image periodically over half an hour. I think doing so actually added something to the meeting, if only some humor. I would have preferred the full set of graphical tools in photoshop instead of the crude whiteboard pens. Sharing a whole desktop, as I said, is probably better.
West Portal is now a cross platform office. The day box 3 of 3 arrived, I plugged in the system and powered up the Dell. Less than 30 seconds after Windows 95 began its startup sequence, my entire Macintosh system shut down -- hard drives, scanner, monitor, computer. I tried wiggling the plug, turning on and off the buttons on the power strips, but everything was dead. A plot by Microsoft! To no avail I turned on and off all the circuits in the house, leaving VCRs, microwaves and clocks all flashing 12:00. When Sheldon came home, he tried flipping the one powerstip on/off button I apparently had missed, and everything came back on. Still, it seemed a fitting first startup and accompanying overreaction on my part.
Now the two machines are sitting side by side. I have one phone line, so need to pick which is online. But I just ordered a ricochet cellular modem and will use that on the Mac when I am not going portable with the laptop, so both will be simultaneously online soon. I have a PCMaclan Appletalk network set up between them for sharing files and printers. I love having 2 active computers. Four or five would be better, but two is nice.
Probably the 49er's playoff loss gave you a better sense of the rain and mud than these photos do. It's fun to watch rain rush down the steep incline of Funston Avenue. The outdoor neighbor's cat is usually wetter than shown below and when the sun comes out, she gets weirdly fluffy. In summer it is foggy and cloudy most of the time yet never rains. Now it rains almost every day, but also usually clears up for a while. The garden which was mostly dirt is full of soft green things.
We took Saturday through Monday before New Years off to drive 4.5 hours down the coast to Hearst Castle and then back along the ocean through Big Sir. The views were stunning. 30+ elephant seals lay on the beach a little too far away to show up with this Casio digital camera lens, as were most of the seals and sea otters we saw. If you want to take the time to load vacation images, jump to this dedicated page. Late Monday morning, Sheldon sprained his ankle and broke his foot navigating a rocky seaside cliff path. He walked back to the car (3/4 mile) and suggested we also take a walking tour of a nearby mission before driving home. (Why do people do think braving pain for absurd reasons is heroic?) Anyway, I declined the mission tour and he spent the drive home in the passenger seat swelling and bruising. An evening in the emergency room and two weeks on crutches and things are beginning to heal. I am not accustomed to being the healthy one who can bike and walk.
