4B-3

情報処理学会第66回全国大会

t-Room: Telecollaborative Room for Everyday Interaction
Keiji Hirata Yasunori Harada Takehiko Ohno Tatsumi Yamada
Junji Yamato Yutaka Yanagisawa
NTT Communication Science Laboratories

Abstract
The t-Room project, which was initiated in the fall of 2003,
create a telecollaborative room that overcomes the timeand space barriers in communication, enabling people andthings to resonate with each other. Users will be able tointeract with various media to enhance their creativity inremote rooms. In the t-Room system, a network connects
two or more remote rooms in which users can experience
everyday interaction. Various types of awareness areshared among the rooms, and an environment for
telecollaboration in everyday life is created. The media
available include not only commonly used ones, such as
natural language, vision, and sound, but also thenon-verbal media that have not been investigatedextensively so far, such as eye gaze, human movement,gesture, and music. Awareness is acquired by interaction
through these media. By sharing and controlling theawareness information among the rooms, users can feel as
if they are in the same room. We briefly mention a systemarchitecture and technical issues to be solved.

1. Introduction and Background
Collaboration with others is an essential activity forcreative life. We refer to collaboration as an effectivemeans for creating something new collaboratively.
There are several frameworks and models forcreativity; among them, the Genex framework by
Shneiderman is helpful because it takes into accountnot only the moment of creation but also the processes
before and after the moment [Sh00]. The Genex
framework involves four activities and four levels ofrelationships; the four activities are collect(information gathering), relate (communicating withmentors), create (innovation itself), and donate(disseminating innovations), and the four levels are self,family & friends, colleagues & neighbors, and citizens& markets. The Genex framework suggests thatcreation in itself requires collaboration at various levels.
Along this line, many collaborative systems have beendeveloped, and many researchers have come torecognize the importance of awareness information inremote collaborative systems [DB92, MB97].
Nishigaki and Ishii claimed that collaboration can work
well on an appropriate hierarchy of communication andawareness [NI92].
The definition of “awareness” is still ambiguous andvarying. According to Liechti and Sumi [LS02],
awareness means the ability to maintain consistentknowledge about the situation and activities of otherpeople, and the types of awareness include group,workspace, peripheral, and context. It is thus desirable
for users in remote collaborative systems to share thesetypes of awareness.
Media and interaction technologies have been
intensively studied in the framework of context-aware
computing, ubiquitous computing, and sensor-fusion
computing [AAB00, MIT00, Na02]. These research
projects attempted to break from the traditional closed
desktop computing environment and move into theopen real world, such as daily life at home, where users
are intimately involved in everyday interaction withvarious pervasive media. One of the research trends
underlying these projects is broadening of the types of
media that carry awareness information and deepeningof the reasoning about it.
Traditional computer science mainly calculates
discrete symbols and static patterns in a well-restricteddomain that is abstract and isolated from the real world.
Computer science researchers have developed various
algorithms that rely strongly on co-occurrence andchaining relationships at a superficial level. However,
the algorithms are insufficient for precise and flexible
analysis, inference, control, or prediction of events andthings in the real world for two reasons. One is that thedeep structures and meanings of events and things are
not taken into account. The other is that only a few
kinds of media for observing the real world areavailable. Hence, a system can neither acquireappropriate awareness information nor create usefulknowledge. The previous projects have investigatedobject location, time, and (continuous time-series)
sensor data as new information sources that can convey
the primary everyday-life meanings of events andthings in the real world.
Our aim is to advance this research trend in two ways.
One is incorporating even newer media such as eye
gaze [OMY04], human movement [YAS03], gesture,and music [HA03]. Such media provide awarenessinformation that is more closely related to humanactivity and intention. The other is formalizing theinteraction through the media. That is, we would
explore a new paradigm in which interaction throughthe media is regarded as computation in the sense ofcomputer science [We95].

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2. Architecture
Based on this background, we initiated a research
project called t-Room. The aim of the t-Room projectis to create a telecollaborative system in which users
can interact with various media to enhance theircreativities. Accordingly, various types of awarenessinformation are shared among remote rooms (Fig. 1).

The person on the left in each room is actually in room
#1, and the other person is actually in room #2. They
are interacting with various things surrounding them
via media. The t-Room system captures throughsensors their interactive activities, from whichawareness information is acquired. Then, the systemtransfers the awareness information to the other room,and simulates the actions in the other room. During thereproduction, the system can appropriately modify theawareness information, integrate pieces of awarenessinformation in distinct modality, and change modality
as needed. Two people can share a feeling as if bothpeople were actually in the same room [Ha98]. In thissense, the t-Room system can be regarded to someextent as a shared ubiquitous environment.
The technical issues to be solved are: (1) grounding
objects and messages onto things and events in therooms, (2) formalizing media interaction, and (3)integrating awareness information for reproducing thefeeling of a single room.

3. Concluding Remarks
Related work includes CSCW and teleconferencing.
Well-known telecollaborative systems include Colab[SFB87], ClearBoard [IK92], and HyperMirror[MM98].
We plan to complete prototyping of the t-Room system
within three years, with possible scenarios includingasynchronous meetings and collaborative musicalcomposition.

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