Product designers at Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc., for example, use their CAVE to simulate what happens inside a pager when it is dropped. You wouldn't want the kind of reality you get in a CAVE to drive your car, for instance, because those freeze-ups lasting five minutes could be fatal. True Grid will enable computer scientists to tweak their software so that CAVE environments will become more realistic, he said. But you might want to spend a lot of time in a room where one entire wall is a large screen with numerous images on it. Some images show colleagues working at other locations or maybe in an office lunchroom where people are chatting over a beverage.
Some images are large computer displays filled with data.
We're experimenting with designs that are more inherently collaborative. We're trying to find what is most natural. This is the kind of environment in which you might just yell to ask a question of a colleague in another city sitting in his own room with eight or nine images of other colleagues on the wall. The Illinois researchers term this the Access Grid environment. These displays, called Active Murals, enable researchers in different locations to view the same information simultaneously and to exchange ideas in real time.