This fascinating article focuses on a multimedia system, the nanoManipulator Collaboratory, which supports collaborative research work in a real life research environment. The authors present a well-designed research project that was intended to assess the effectiveness of the system in supporting face-to-face versus remote teamwork. In line with previous research in this area, the authors did not find major differences between the face-to-face and remote conditions in terms of the ability of the teams to complete the projects. However, they did find, through in-depth interviews with the participants, that the remote condition triggered work-arounds, namely, the participants talked more frequently and more descriptively with each other to compensate for not having face-to-face contact.

One of the most innovative aspects of this research is that the investigators did not simply compare the two conditions. Instead, they required each team to engage in both conditions, but in a different order, letting some teams start with the face-to-face condition, while others started with the remote condition. As a result of this procedure, the most surprising finding from this research is that the teams who started with the remote condition outperformed the teams who started with the face-to-face condition. This is surprising because the literature tells us that establishing trust (through face-to-face interaction) is an important condition of engaging in long term effective remote work. Perhaps the explanation for this finding is that the work that the teams in this study performed was relatively short in duration.