Common Ground: Establishing Group Awareness for Cross-Virtuality Collaborative Geospatial Analysis

Virtual Reality (VR) and desktop users struggle to coordinate due to scale differences when analyzing geospatial data. This work explores multiscale workspace awareness techniques in geospatial analysis scenarios, such as scale-responsive cursors and vistas. A study (n = 16) compared Common Ground to current collaboration tools. The results reveal that 34% of users struggle to maintain awareness of their collaborator’s focus, which drops to 9% with Common Ground; and 32% of users struggle to know precisely what features their collaborator referenced, decreasing to 15% with Common Ground. A follow-up with 12 geospatial practitioners provided insights into real-world applications of our system.