Co-Located Collaboration

Co-located collaboration is the shared activity of people working or playing together while physically present in the same space, as distinct from remote or distributed collaboration. In HCI and accessibility research, co-located collaboration is studied because it adds embodied channels - posture, proxemics, gaze, shared haptic contact, directly visible body language - that distributed systems must otherwise simulate. It is particularly relevant for designing assistive co-op patterns such as Xbox Adaptive Controller 'co-pilot' modes, where a disabled player and a partner jointly drive a single in-game avatar in the same room, and for mixed-reality experiences where headsets restrict peripheral vision and increase the value of shared physical cues.