Enhancing distributed corporate meetings with lightweight avatars

The difficulties remote participants of distributed meetings face are widely recognized. In this paper we describe the design of an avatar-based e-meeting support tool named Olympus, which aims to ameliorate some of the challenges remote participants face in distributed meetings. Olympus provides a customizable peripheral display on the bottom of existing e-meeting solutions. An initial observational study was conducted of the use of Olympus in 6 meetings, three each of a status meeting and a presentation meeting. Avatars fostered team bonding through social play during status meetings, while minimalist dots allowed focused attention during presentation meetings. © 2010 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).