# Presentation: 540472

## Jason Leigh

- Amplified Collaboration Environments

## A focal point of EVL’s collaboration research is motivated by the Maximally Co-Located Project Room or War Room

- Olson & Olson – Michigan
- Study of 9 project rooms – software design, appliance design, organization design, sales response team
- Reported initial fear that co-located work may be distracting. Disadvantages of co-location was easily overcome by the benefits
- Comparison of war room groups with norm showed performance of war room group well above corporate average (doubling for software design case)

## Maximally Co-Located Think Rooms, Project Rooms, War Rooms

- Their time was not shared with other projects
- Fluidity of subgroup formation was rated very important
- Flip charts were persistent configurable records of their past meeting results. Charts could be moved anywhere
- Spatiality was important. Relationship of participants with artifacts in the space. Deictic references to them.
- Digital white boards saved time
- Small nearby cubicles to provide quiet but maintain accessibility to others

- Welcome to EVL

## The Continuum

- Passive stereo
- Immersive Display

- Camera array

- Wireless tablets, PDAs,
- laptops

- Plasma Touch screen
- for annotations

**The Continuum**

- Tiled display
- (LCD tiles for high resolution,
- or plasma screens)

## The Continuum at EVL

- Challenge is to develop software to seamlessly integrate these
- technologies to allow effortless use.

## Modules in the Continuum

- Video Conferencing
- Immersion
- Large Scale Data Visualization and Distribution
- Annotation
- Wireless Interaction
- Concept is to provide a collection of mix and matchable modules to support a variety of collaboration “styles”

## Video Conferencing: The AccessGrid

## Immersion : The AGAVE

- Access Grid Augmented Virtual Environment

- Originally designed & developed by EVL in 2001
- Now widespread adoption by GeoWall Consortium for
- Research & education in the Geosciences
- (www.geowall.org)

## 70 Walls since Jan 2001

- 40

- 70

## The GeoWall Consortium

- Provides open source software and data sets for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, to Geoscience researchers and educators.
- Integration into Univ. Michigan, Minnesota and Arizona State curriculum- ~3000 students per year
- Deployment at SciTech Museum in Aurora, Illinois
- Adoption by Earthscope Education and Outreach program

## Collaborative Annotation :The Plasma Touch Screen

- Matisse Smartboard over Plasma screen as
- the persistent flip-chart

## Large Scale Data Visualization and Distribution : TeraScope

- Goal is to develop information browsing interfaces that make manipulating, visualizing and interpreting massive data sets as easy as operating a spreadsheet- a Terabyte spreadsheet!
- Provide the illusion that you are clicking on a terabyte data file.
- Visualization consists of visual summaries/precis of data sets highlighting correlations and detailed visualizations of sub-regions
- Visualization hardware should be a tiled display where a number of visualizations can be shown simultaneously for inspection- this is in contrast to the traditional use of tiled displays for 1 big picture

## TeraScope

**TeraScope**

- Large Dataspace
- data store

- LambdaRAM(Network Memory cache)

- Parallel Datamining &visualization

- GigEs
- (long distance,high latency)

- Local & metro area
- GigEs

- 100M/s – 24 hours to access 1 Terabyte of data
- 500M/s – 4.8 hours using a single PC
- 10G/s –  14.4 minutes using 20 node PC cluster

## Large Data Visualization and Distribution : TeraVision

- VGA / DVI capture

- GigE

- RemoteDisplay

- Raw image capture (1024x768 30fps)
- 500Mbps uncompressed stream
- Software independent

## Gang TeraVision boxes to stream a CAVE or a tiled display

- Grid
- Computing /
- Data Resource

- High resolution
- parallel rendering
- on high performance
- Visualization cluster

- multicast

## Wireless Interaction

- Allow users to drag & drop documents from their laptops & PDAs into the Continuum for viewing by participants.
- Then steer the manipulation of the document by remote control of Continuum displays.

## Thank You

- For more information:
- www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/teranode
- www.geowall.org
- This work is supported in part by:
- The National Science Foundation
- The Office of Naval Research
- Microsoft Corporation