This article follows an HCI experiment in Fall of 2021 at Stanford to build a in-person and remote room for office hours as part of independent work with Kayvon Fatahalian.
As a college student, I have benefited from the learning flexibility of the pandemic. While it is easy to miss the vibrancy of an in-person class, jumping into a virtual room is often more convenient.
Expectations to attend in-person events have changed. Consciousness around COVID means many students have adapted to expect interoperability between in-person and remote experiences. This challenges professors to appeal to student needs. In this project, we wanted to preserve in-person attendance, but open up office hours to a new subset of people who can not attend physically. A hybrid setup allows for people who otherwise might miss altogether to participate.
The focus of this project is to better support office hours where students are in-person and remote. Instead of forcing symmetry where everyone logs into a virtual portal, we built an asymmetrical layout. This asymmetry is a result of remote and in-person participants experiencing two different perspectives in the hybrid event. Remote participants join the meeting through a video conference while in-person participants enter a physical event space. Remote people have a 1:1 camera-person relationship while in-person people are many people to one camera. These experiences do not mirror each other in interaction or architecture.
Remote and in-person participants have distinct needs because of this asymmetry. Participating remotely is more accessible, anonymous, and often more time-efficient. In-person experience has more freedom to interact and fewer distractions. We can think of remote and in-person as different cohorts. In this project, we designed around these two formats, creating one experience for in-person and one for remote participants.
Kayvon Fatahalian, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and I built the virtual office hour space with the intention of making his CS 147 hybrid. The setup was developed in this context, so has specific benefits to problem set-oriented work in STEM classes. We used ohyay, a tool I have been building on for over a year, to design the virtual space. Its customizability to drag and drop where people sit virtually and build links between rooms let us make a conference environment with two different sides.
Tenets of a good drop-in experience
Digital lurking can be a learning tool
Digital lurking makes up the vast majority of people on the internet. This behavior can be defined as browsing social media and forums without engaging other users. Although digital lurking has negative connotations, in practice it can have a positive effect. In a 2021 case study on the learning potential of lurking in online forums, Novak and Kalir found “participants saw lurking as a way of learning without risk of unnecessarily exposing themselves.” Digital lurking allows for unique benefits in educational contexts. Participants’ expectation to have their camera off and mic muted provides digital privacy that can help eliminate barriers to entry created by “feelings of vulnerability due to a perceived lack of knowledge.” COVID consciousness and unconformability are just some reasons why a student might want to attend a remote office hour. The affordances of digital lurking can make remote participants feel more comfortable.
Getting the most information you can
Static tiles displaying cameras off do not provide added value to an in-person class. Visual information displayed, if at all, should be the most relevant possible information at that moment, whether a chat, a headcount, reactions or live feed when asking a question. In his virtual classes, Professor Fatahalian notes that information like emoji reactions can provide this visual feedback when he is trying to “read the room” without “facial expressions and eye contact.” From my experience in office hours, I often shift my point of view in the room, from student to whiteboard to professor. However, remote attendees have limited degrees of freedom in the camera angles they see. We wanted to give remote people control to adjust to action in a room.
Building a unified distributed room
Working remotely has forced me to reconceptualize the physical space that I live in. Location no longer being an inhibitor, I spent more daytime interacting in virtual spaces than physical ones last year. Distributed space is a term coined by Stanford lecturer Glenn Fajero for how we merge our physical spaces with our virtual ones. For these office hours, we wanted to take physical space and add a distributed aspect to it. If a room gets divided into virtual and in-person parts, people end up losing value-form half of the conversation. Creating a distributed space meant making remote participants feel more present in the physical room and in-person participants subtly aware of the presence of people beyond the physical room. In other words, we want to minimize the remote or in-person divide; anyone should be able to talk and address everyone at once, remote and in-person. The digital space should act as an extension to the in-person experience so that anyone talking is addressing a whole room.
What we built
Our goal was to create different experiences for in-person and remote people and have both get value from it. Remote people viewed live cams in the room; in-person could observe a board with the content being streamed from remote attendees. We want the setup to be assemblable in five minutes.
Entering the space
Lurking mode lets remote guests watch a semi-blurred view of the lecture without fully entering as a participant.
Remote Side
Participants choose a camera. This lets virtual attendees choose a focus in the room. In our set up virtual people could view the room in 360 or a close-up of the whiteboard, but you can use any camera. They can also use chat, side conversation, or waitlist features.
Asking questions
Remote participants can bring attention to themselves by clicking the “Raise your hand” button. This enlarges them, making them the focus. Remote participants chat or que in the waitlist if enabled.
In-person side
The board has a chat, waitlist, participant count and live participants. When a remote person raises there hand they layout for inperson people changes enlarged the remote person on screen. This helps in-person people have relevant information about the conversation.
Mobile chat
Anyone on a mobile device can access a chat. This is helpful for in-person attendees, but could also be used by remote people to contribute asynchronously.
Screen sharing
Screen shares get broadcast to the in-person room and remote participants. This can be used as a way to show questions or a whiteboard virtually.
Professor View
The admin can pop out a view to the monitor while having a second screen on their laptop with admin controls and chat. This is helpful for multi-tasking in a conversation. This view also has simple set up steps to get the space started.
How we addressed our goals
Addressing needs of lurkers
Remote participants enter the virtual space in lurking mode. This gives them a chance to choose wether to eneter the space. They are by themselves and see a live camera of the room but are not visible to others. This lets remote participants tune in and out while remaining on the periphery. Think of walking passed a room and peeking through the glass before you go in. Once you choose to enter your feed is streamed to others but in a minimized way. You can still choose to have your camera off and will be small on screen. Over four test days, only one remote person chose to turn their camera on virtually. This was expected behavior and enforces the idea of lurking as a default. We think this different mode of attendance could help virtual people control their presence in the room.
Directing focus in a conversation
The multiple camera angle setup was used constantly by remote attendees. In every test run, we saw remote attendees switch back and forth between cameras. Using a 360 camera was particularly interesting because it allowed remote attendees to see the whole room including themselves on the monitor. For the whiteboard, we used a wide-angle camera. There was some glare, which meant visibility might be difficult. We felt these cameras helped remote people better focus on what was important to them.
Instead of just streaming remote participants to a grid, in-person participants saw a board with multiple communication channels on it. Remote participants were only large on-screen when they opted-in by using the “raise your hand” button to enlarge themselves on the screen. We saw this used a few participants. At other times the screen prioritizes chat and any waitlist if used. Reactions were available for any remote participant to use at any point.
Addressing the room
The premise of the setup is that everyone in the session can see and hear the room. Screen sharing worked well here, helping connect private space and the shared virtual space. Remote and in-person people both shared their screens to get help on questions. The screen shares get broadcast onto the monitor and into the virtual space. This also means anyone in-person can log on and share their screen to the monitor for other in-person participants.
To merge the digital and physical space communication channels needed to be synced across remote and in-person formats. Chat should be accessible by in-person people as well as remote. This was done using mobile as a digital linkage to chat for in-person participants. Our setup uses one central mic and speaker to channel audio through, either from your computer or an attached mic, for all communication. These features mean that any conversation between students and professors could be heard by everyone.
Where to go from here?
As my classes return to fully in-person formats, I continue to see situations where remote applications can be beneficial to students. I also hear stories from friends who prefer attending certain parts of class like office hours, homework help and sections online. There is evidently a lot more potential in the application of use cases, but also with technical A/V equipment currently being used. However, with a 360 camera, web camera and laptop you can set this hybrid video conference space up. The ohyay space we designed for office hours will be available and includes the quick start dashboard for setting it up with your cameras.
