Project Overview

The work is centered around three abstract organizational settings: the Commons, the Workroom, and the Presentation Room.

THEME 1: A Virtual Commons

Using awareness to move into collaboration

Distance is a serious impediment to rich casual interaction; as a result, distributed groups have difficulty getting together for collaboration, conversation, and work. Our goal is to make these casual encounters and their resulting activities possible and natural wherever people are located. To achieve this goal, we must research and articulate how people maintain awareness of others and of communal events and artifacts, and how people use that awareness to initiate collaboration in both real-world and computerized environments. We can use this knowledge to construct a virtual Commons: technology that lets people easily track critical awareness information, and that lets them use that information as an opportunity to seamlessly initiate collaboration. More Information »

THEME 2: High-performance Workrooms

Interaction with shared displays and workspaces

Collaboration is not easy in Workrooms containing computational workspaces (the electronic counterparts of physical surfaces that include computer displays, electronic tables and whiteboards, and large projected displays). Our goal is to enable rich and natural interaction in Workrooms containing computational workspaces - interaction that matches and surpasses the ways that people now work over physical tabletops and whiteboards. To achieve this goal, we must develop a detailed understanding of how people interact over real-world surfaces, and of the limitations imposed by current computational displays and workspaces. We can use this knowledge to develop interaction techniques tailored to group situations. In particular, we investigate multi-user multi-device input, multi-user interaction techniques, and expressive actions over group-oriented displays. More Information »

THEME 3: The Extended Presentation Room

Scalable interactive audiovisual communications

The presentation is a collaborative activity in which one person formally communicates to many others information in the form of briefings or lectures. Ancillary to the Workroom, it supports small group presentations such as seminars or spontaneous talks. In the Commons, people can subconsciously become aware of presentations and smoothly transition from the Commons to a presentation. Presentations are traditionally held in a formal environment in which all people are in the same physical space at the same time. Yet, within many government agencies, corporations, and organizations, there is a need to conduct training and give presentations to members who are distributed both in space and time. We seek to capitalize on one existing real world development, a significant technology infrastructure called ePresence (Baecker 2002; Baecker et al., 2003). We ground our work in how interactions currently take place in presentations and lectures that occur both with and without the use of ePresence. More Information »