Multiuser Virtual Environments IV: Collaborative Network Tools
During the past few weeks we've considered multiuser virtual environments for social interaction and military training. But what about plain old work?Chris Locke, well-known computer journalist and media maven has said:
The real and lasting potential of the Internet lies not in TV Guide Online, Batman Forever, and other attempts to view this medium in the rear...the real promise of the medium will be fulfilled within networked communities of practice that offer genuine professional advantage to individuals--and concomitant competitive advantage to the organizations that employ them.
Where are the network applications that will allow this to take place? There are some special requirements for cooperative work, in particular, a shared workspace where remote participants can write and cooperatively operate software. I describe next a few projects that are developing the tools to make this possible.
The GreenSpace Project
The
GreenSpace Project of the Human Interface
Technology (HIT) Lab, at the University of Washington, aims to develop
and demonstrate an
immersive communications medium where distant participants feel a sense of
presence in a shared virtual
environment, a "virtual commonality."
In 1994, the project gave a public
demonstration linking Tokyo and Seattle in a real-time VR teleconference
on November 14-17, 1994. The U.S. participants saw a
Japanese meeting room, with Mt. Fuji in the background. The Japanese
participants saw a Western log cabin with a view of Mt. Ranier. At each
corner of the table was a goalpost; the four participants engaged in a
cooperative
game of herding creatures into these goals, complete with sound effects.
In Phase II of the GreenSpace Project, HIT Lab is applying the concept of
distributed VR technology to architecture--but not to architecture as we now
know it.
Dace Campbell, a "virtual architect" at HIT Lab,
is designing virtual spaces that are not meant to be built in the
physical world.
"I see this as a call to arms for architects," Campbell said. "Anyone who has browsed the Web is bewildered and overwhelmed at first because it's not laid out in the way we're used to experiencing our environment. And that confusion will be even more intense as we move into three-dimensional Web applications. Architecture--whether it uses bricks and mortar in the physical world or digital data on the Internet--is the perfect metaphor to give meaning to a three-dimensional environment."
The PAD Project
The PAD project
created by researchers at the New York University (NYU) Center for Digital
Multimedia, Bellcore and the University of New Mexico (UNM) allows people at multiple sites on
the Internet to work collaboratively on a virtual desktop. PAD users can share tools like a
whiteboard and other applications. They can also roam across the infinite
2-D desktop and zoom in and out of different levels--from folders to subfolders and
documents--authoring as they go.
At first glance the Pad++ screen looks like the desktop of the Macintosh with folders arrayed as squares on a two-dimensional surface. A Mac user would double click on a folder icon and see the contents in a window. To see the contents of any folder within that folder, the user would again have to double click to create a new window. A Pad++ user, on the other hand, views a directory through a "portal"--a magnifying glass that allows him or her to roam over different parts of a single infinite shared desktop and "zoom" into any portion of the surface, descending into folders to reveal the directories without clicking.
Ken Perlin of NYU came up with the initial zoomable surface concept. He and David Fox, also of NYU, implemented the first versions of Pad, which were the precursors to the current implementation--Pad++. Perlin and Fox's original work was supported in part by NYNEX and then the National Science Foundation. The primary creator of Pad++ is Ben Bederson. The development team is now centered at UNM.
Describing Pad, Perlin says, "The concept is very natural since it mimics
the way we continually manage to find things by giving everything a physical
place. A good approximation to the ideal depicted would be to provide ourselves
with some sort of system of 'magic magnifying glasses' through which we can read, write, or
create cross-references on an indefinitely enlargeable ('zoomable') surface."
CAVEviewer
CAVEviewer is a mosaic-based VR tool developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
It is a viewer ehancement of the EVL's CAVE--a walk-in, projection-based VR
system.
CAVEviewer provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for real-time manipulation of CAVE application simulations. It is a means for nonexperts/nondevelopers to conduct CAVE simulation viewing--in 3-D and tracked stereo--as well as exploration via NCSA Mosaic.
CAVEviewer works by allowing the user to bring the application object file to his or her own computer over the network--rather than the usual pictures, video, and sound clips--which enables the user to have complete control over a virtual environment, and provides the luxury of exploring 3-D objects in it for an unlimited amount of time without the cost in download time and storage space of large animation files.
FAST Expeditions
At the NASA Ames Laboratory, in sight of a massive wind tunnel used for
studying the aerodynamic characteristics of the space shuttle and commercial
aircraft, Dr. Val Watson and his colleagues have developed a visualization tool
called FAST (Flow Analysis Software Toolkit) that allows multiple users at
different locations on the Internet to see and manipulate 3-D scientific
visualizations and carry on a live videoconference as they do it.
Watson is on the staff of the Numerical Aerodynamics and Simulation (NAS) facility, which plans, by the year 2000, to provide the nation's aerospace research and development community with a high-performance operational computing system capable of simulating an entire vehicle system within a computing range of one to several hours.
To that end, NAS has established Aeronet, the NAS Wide-Area Network, a high-performance data and communications network that provides access to the NAS supercomputing facilities. Nodes on the Aeronet include the Jet Propulsion Lab, Boeing, the Naval Research Lab, and many other large and small research centers.
FAST won the 1995 NASA software development award, and any interested party can download a free copy of the 30-megabyte application from the FAST Web site at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. A Silicon Graphics Indy workstation is required to use it. To see the 3-D graphics best, users wear "crystal eyes"--the 3-D glasses that will allow them to take full advantage of the Indy's stereo visualizing capability.
Watson hopes FAST will become a popular educational tool, and has proposed that the NSF write a procurement specification and negotiate discounts with vendors so that schools can buy off that single procurement and not have to do their own shopping for the needed hardware.
Perspective
Again, consider the comments of Chris Locke:
Wired-to-the-eyes Web surfing reflects the novelty of the medium and the youthful enthusiasm of the current audience. . . . The enthusiasm being displayed here is a joyous reaction to the empowerment true interactivity confers: to connect, communicate, collaborate and conspire.The long-term focus of these spontaneously evolving communities will be on turning shared enthusiasms into new means to assure professional viability. Compared to the glitzy online spectacles proffered by brand-crazed media moguls and their high-power public relations machines, this prediction may sound laughably trivial. However, I am convinced that this new opportunity for free and open knowledge exchange will drive a new age of learning and cultural evolution not seen since the High Renaissance. And anyone who doubts the commercial potential of such a prospect merely needs to read a little history.
I heartily agree. The best commercial uses of the Internet are yet to come. Just as the PC didn't really have an impact on work until the development of VisiCalc and other spreadsheet applications, neither will the Internet until there are commonly available tools for collaborative work. These will become available in the marketplace in the next five years, bringing about a greater transformation than we can yet imagine.
