TeamRooms also provides several facilities for maintaining awareness of other team members. The two windows on the right of Figure 1 show who is around and in which rooms they are working. Within the current room, its participants are always visible. Telepointers show users' fine-grained activities. Neither are successful at providing the overall collaboration support offered by conventional team rooms.
Traditional MUDs are text-based systems where users connect to a central server.
Once connected, they enter any number of different rooms, chat with other users in those rooms, and create and modify artifacts in the rooms. Though primarily used socially, MUDs have been used to support collaborative work, though their text-only presentation has proved limiting. We are not unique in trying to provide more sophisticated media in shared electronic spaces. The result is a system providing the electronic equivalent of a team room for co-located or distributed work groups. Our early usage experiences with TeamRooms are quite encouraging, and we have found that it does afford many of the same behaviors seen when teams share a physical space.