In 1995, Heath, Luff, & Sellen lamented the uptake of video conferencing indicating that it had not at the time reached its promise. But looking back at this projection, the ubiquity of video systems for social and work communication can be seen. And subsequently, research has gone about understanding it further in a variety of HCI paradigms (CHI2010, CSCW2010, CHI2018). So, for my research, making projections on the use of VR for music collaboration, it might be that findings and insights do not reach fruition, either, in a timely fashion, or in the domain of interest that they were investigated in, or ever! Though this could be touching on a form of hindsight bias.

Going back to the article that speculated on the unobtained promise of video conferencing technologies, Heath Luff, and Sellen (1995), provide a piece of insight that can still be placed into perspective on design interventions for collaboration:

It becomes increasingly apparent, when you examine work and collaboration in more conventional environments, that the inflexible and restrictive views characteristic of even the most sophisticated media spaces, provide impoverished settings in which to work together. This is not to suggest that media space research should simply attempt to ‘replace’ co-present working environments, such ambitions are way beyond our current thinking and capabilities. Rather, we can learn a great deal concerning the requirements for the virtual office by considering how people work together and collaborate in more conventional settings. A more rigorous understanding of more conventional collaborative work, can not only provide resources with which to recognise how, in building technologies we are (inadvertently) changing the ways in which people work together, but also with ways in which demarcate what needs to be supported and what can be left to one side (at least for time being). Such understanding might also help us deploy these advanced technologies.

The bold section highlights the nub of what I’m interested in; for VR music collaboration systems. I break this down into how I’ve tackled framing collaboration in my research:

• conventional collaborative work – ethnographies of current and developing practice. Even if you pitch a radical agenda of VR workspace, basic features of the domain of interest need to be understood for their contextual and technical practices.
• building technology is changing practice – observing the impact of design interventions on how people collaborate in media production. Not only does a technology suggest new ways of working, it can enforce them! Observing and understanding this in domain-specific ways is important.
• what needs to be supported – basic interactional requirements, we have to be able to make sense of each other, and the work, together, in an efficient manner.
• what can be left to one side – the exact models and metaphors of how work is constructed in reality, in VR we can create work setups and perspectives that cannot exist in reality. For instance, shared spatial perspectives i.e. seeing the same thing from the same perspective is impossible in reality as we have to occupy a separate physical space. In repositioning basic features of spatial collaboration, the effects need to be understood in terms of interaction and domain requirement. But the value is in finding new ways of doing things not possible in face to face collaboration.

Overall, the key theme that should be taken away is that of humans’ need to communicate and collaborate. In this sense, any research that looks to make collaboration easier is provisioning for basic human understanding. That is quite nice to be a part of.