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CSCW'98 Benefactors:

SMART Technologies

Lotus

Microsoft Research


CSCW'98 Sponsors:

Sun Microsystems

MITRE


[ACM]
 
Videos

Available at the conference on hotel televisions and in the Olympic Room. Also available on NTSC or PAL video tape.

  1. A Demonstration of Awareness Driven Video Quality of Service
  2. i-LAND: An Interactive Landscape for Creativity and Innovation
  3. Insight Lab: A Team Workspace
  4. The Mirror: Reflections on Inhabited TV
  5. GestureLaser: Supporting Hand Gestures in Remote Instruction
  6. Hypermirror: Mirror Reflections Representing Users as If They Are All in the Same Room
  7. Crisis in Ragan: Orbit At Work
  8. GAZE: Visual-Spatial Attention in Communication
  9. The SubCam: An Insight into the Phenomenal Flow of Office Life
  10. Enabling Personal Tele-Embodiment
  11. Focus and Awareness in Groupware


1. A Demonstration of Awareness Driven Video Quality of Service
Gail Reynard (gtr@cs.nott.ac.uk), Chris Greenhalgh, and Steve Benford, Computer Science Department, University of Nottingham, U.K.

We present a combined conferencing/mediaspace application that extends previous work on texture mapping video streams into virtual environments by introducing awareness driven video Quality of Service (QoS). This uses movements within a shared virtual world to activate different video services as defined by their frame-rates. Three different services are supported: portholes, providing 1 frame of video per 5 minutes; glance, 1 frame per second and full frame rate video. Our application uses awareness driven video for facial expressions and for views into remote physical environments. This enables seamless shifts in mutual involvement and makes underlying QoS mechanisms more visible and malleable. The video gives a guided tour through the mediaspace, demonstrating the different video services. This work was published as: "Awareness Driven Video Quality of Service in Collaborative Virtual Environments," Gail Reynard, Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh and Christian Heath, Proceedings CHI '98, April, 1998, Los Angeles, pp. 464-471.

2. i-LAND: An Interactive Landscape for Creativity and Innovation
Torsten Holmer (holmer@darmstadt.gmd.de), Laurent Lacour, and Norbert Streitz, GMD-IPSI, German National Research Center for Information Technology - Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute, Germany

i-LAND constitutes an example of our vision of the workspaces of the future employing "roomware" components in so called "cooperative buildings". It provides an innovative work environment supporting cooperative work of dynamic teams with changing needs resulting from new work practices as, e.g., ad hoc and on demand teams. We propose an integrated design of digital information spaces and real architectural spaces enabling new forms of human-computer interaction and support for cooperative work. The approach is related to augmented reality and ubiquitous computing. The central concept presented in the video is the notion of "roomware" components, i.e. computer-augmented objects integrating room elements with information technology. We present the current realization of i-LAND in terms of an interactive wall (DynaWall), an interactive table (InteracTable), and two computer-enhanced chairs (CommChairs). They are complemented by the Passage mechanism which allows for an intuitive physical transportation of digital information. The concept and the usage of the roomware components is demonstrated with several sample scenes. (See: http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/ambiente/activities/i-land.html)

3. Insight Lab: A Team Workspace
James Meyers (meyers@cstar.ac.com), Beth Lange, and Mark Jones, Center for Strategic Technology Research, Andersen Consulting, USA

The Insight Lab is an environment in which teams come together to analyze complex situations. The lab is particularly valuable when teams are studying large amounts of qualitative data, including videotapes, audio recordings, photos or documents. In addition to utilizing a three monitor large-screen display, the lab takes advantage of electronic whiteboards, linked sticky notes, and linked printed reports to bring information out of the computer box and into the physical world. By linking pieces of paper to the digital world via barcodes, the lab turns its walls into a huge computer desktop. The Insight Lab utilizes electronic whiteboards and linked sticky notes to capture critical team interactions, thereby documenting the rationale behind a group decision. Working "out-of-the-box" and maintaining a group memory provides a truly immersive environment, thereby creating a next generation team workspace.

4. The Mirror: Reflections on Inhabited TV
Andrew McGrath (andy.mcgrath@bt-sys.bt.co.uk), Amanda Oldroyd, and Graham Walker, BT Labs, British Telecom, UK

Inhabited TV is a vision of future television services in which multi-user 3D virtual environments deliver unprecedented levels of audience participation. Social chat and interaction are mixed with professional content and programming to create on-line communities. The Mirror was a ground-breaking collaborative experiment in Inhabited TV, created by BT, Sony, Illuminations and the BBC. Six on-line worlds were available to over 2000 viewers of the BBC2 series "The Net" in January and February 1997, and this video provides a flavour of the project.

5. GestureLaser: Supporting Hand Gestures in Remote Instruction
Hideaki Kuzuoka (kuzuoka@kuzuoka-lab.esys.tsukuba.ac.jp) and Shinya Oyama, Institute of Engineering Mechanics, University of Tsukuba, Japan, Hiroshi Kato and Hideyuki Suzuki, C & C Media Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation, Japan, Keiichi Yamazaki and Akiko Yamazaki, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Saitama University, Japan, and Hiroyuki Miki, Media Laboratories, Oki Electric Industry Company, Japan

GestureLaser is a remote controlled laser pointer which allows an instructor to gesture at real world objects over distances. To control the position of the GestureLaser's spot, a laser beam is reflected by two mirrors each rotated by a stepping motor. The remote instructor controls the motion of the laser's spot using a computer mouse in the same way an ordinary mouse pointer is controlled. The instructor can thus show position, rotation and direction by moving the spot. The laser's low illumination mode is used to indicate transitions between gestures while still allowing operators to track the spot. We have already undertaken a few experiments in order to understand how users can effectively use the laser's spot as a substitute for real hand gestures.

6. Hypermirror: Mirror Reflections Representing Users As If They Are All in the Same Room
Osamu Morikawa (morikawa@nibh.go.jp), National Institute of Bioscience and Human Technology, Japan and Takanori Maesako, Faculty of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan

HyperMirror is a new video communication system which realizes video WISIWYS (What I See Is What You See). We create an attractive, highly understandable communication environment, rather than imitating face-to-face communication. Like telephones, this system is intended to have easily understood limitations. Each site has a large screen which displays not only the remote participants image, but also the overlaid mirror image of the local participants. In this way, participants can share exactly the same video space. Thus they can use gestures and pointing to indicate background objects or images. There are several ways to synthesize the HyperMirror image. In this video, we present an optical synthesis and an electronic synthesis uses "chroma-keying".

7. Crisis in Ragan: Orbit At Work
Richard Taylor (taylor@dstc.edu.au), Tim Mansfield, and Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Distributed Systems Technology Centre, University of Queensland, Australia

How can an overworked editor in head office and an unprepared reporter in the far away land of Ragan get a breaking story to press in less than a day? We follow these journalists as they use the WORLDS project's collaboration environment, Orbit, integrated with other prototype tools developed at the DSTC, to accomplish their task. Orbit is based on the notion of software locales or "group-zones" to provide contexts for shared work. A navigator provides access to all the group-zones to which one of the journalists currently belongs. Users can dynamically change their view of each of these group-zones to match their changing needs, and the currently selected documents and folders from all zones are shown in a desktop-style workspace. They can also use integrated audio and video conferencing to communicate with each other. As well as Orbit, the video shows the intrepid team using other integrated DSTC tools including a backwards recovery workflow system, group awareness, and information filtering, to work together to make the 5pm bulletin.

8. GAZE: Visual-Spatial Attention in Communication
Roel Vertegaal (roel@acm.org), Cognitive Ergonomics Department, Twente University, The Netherlands

This video illustrates the importance of conveying visual attention in multiparty mediated systems. In terms of multiparty turntaking efficiency, current-day video-conferencing systems do not seem to provide the expected added value over telephony. We attribute this to a lack of Conversational Awareness: knowing who's talking to whom. The visual attention of participants directly relates to their auditory and articulatory attention, i.e., their gaze direction indicates whom they listen or speak to. Conveying gaze direction seems to ease turntaking by allowing more rapid speaker switches and more efficient use of deictic verbal references (e.g., "What do YOU think?"). This video exemplifies the differences between face-to-face, traditional video-mediated, and attention-based conferencing. It features an early simulation of the GAZE Groupware system, a multiparty mediated system which metaphorically conveys gaze direction. Using an eyetracker, the system measures where participants look inside a 3D virtual meeting room, and rotates their video images to align with their gaze.

9. The SubCam: An Insight into the Phenomenal Flow of Office Life
Anne-Laure Fayard (Anne-Laure.Fayard@edfgdf.fr) and Saadi Lahlou, EDF, France

This video presents the SubCam perspective and methods used to analyze the video data it provides. We study office work in a large industrial research center and focus on the interactions of office workers with their social and spatial environment. Current methods (observations, interviews, ethnographic studies with video) provide interesting data, but fail to identify some key phenomena on the situated nature of the work. In order to determine the affordances of the environment, we design a new observation tool: the Subjective camera or SubCam. It is composed of a pair of glasses on which a miniature video camera and a microphone are clipped. The SubCam gives a rather good indication of what the subject sees, although it does not track eye gaze. It provides an insight in the phenomenal flow in which subjects are immersed and a subjective view of subjects' movements and interactions. The SubCam provides a very large and rich set of data. To focus our investigation, we have chosen 6 foci of analysis grounded on previous results and a first perusal of the data: 1. Interruption; 2. Feeling lost; 3. Navigation in the Workspace; 4. Artifacts; 5. Peripheral Awareness; 6. Cooperation.

10. Enabling Personal Tele-Embodiment
Eric Paulos (paulos@cs.berkeley.edu) and John Canny, Computer Science Department, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Current internet applications fail to interface to the real physical world in which we live, work, and play. This video illustrates the development of several simple, inexpensive, internet-controlled, untethered tele-robots or PRoPs (Personal Roving Presences) that provide the sensation of tele-embodiment in a remote real space. These devices range from small helium filled tele-operated airborne blimps to more recent ground based systems with longer ranges, battery life, and abilities. All PRoPs support at least video and two-way audio as well as mobility through the remote space they inhabit. The physical tele-robot serves both as an extension of its operator and as a visible, mobile entity with which other people can interact. ProPs enable their users to perform a wide gamut of human activities in the remote space, such as exploring, conversing with people, hanging out, wandering around, pointing, examining objects, reading, and making simple gestures. The goal is to identify and distill a small yet sufficient number of traits that are vital to human communication and interaction and to physically implement them on PRoPs. For more information please visit http://www.prop.org.

11. Focus and Awareness in Groupware
Carl Gutwin, Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan, Canada and Saul Greenberg (saul@cpsc.ucalgary.ca), Computer Science Department, University of Calgary, Canada

Medium-sized shared workspaces present two design goals to groupware designers: first, people need to focus on the details of their work; second, people need to stay aware of others working elsewhere in the workspace. This video presents and compares four different visualization techniques for achieving these goals. The techniques are part of a system for building and editing concept maps, visual languages for representing ideas and relationships. When people use concept maps, they often need to work in different parts of the map. Since a groupware workspace can only show a small part of the map at one time, this means that staying aware can become a problem. We present four different visual approaches to supporting both detail and awareness. All approaches extend the earlier versions illustrated in our CSCW '96 videos, and (for ease of comparison) all work within the concept map editor. The radar view splits the interface into detail and awareness windows. The fisheye view uses distortion to integrate detail and awareness in a single window. The dragmag view lets people selectively magnify a portion of a large overview. The two-level view overlays a full-screen overview onto a detail view.


SDM / cscw98-info@acm.org / November 6, 1998