We propose the creation of a National Electronic Laboratory Infrastructure. Sites that wish to host distributed collaborations will create a networked interface to their facilities that will house their scientists, their tools, and their visitors. People will visit these laboratories and work in these laboratories, potentially spending as much or more time in the elab than in the lab. The natural interface provided by such an environment---looking at an instrument, talking to a fellow scientist, sharing a virtual white board---will promote natural collaboration without impeding the process with excessively complex technology.
These elabs will be available to any scientist with an ordinary workstation and an Internet connection. As more sophisticated tools such as CAVEs or high-performance data engines become available, they will be integrated seamlessly into the environment, taking advantage of technology shifts while still promoting collaboration with conventional systems.
The benefits to the users are clear. They will be able to maintain contact with their fellow researchers regardless of their location. They will be able to set an experiment in motion within an elab, and return at a later date to check on the progress. They will have a permanent and natural interface to their scientific instruments and to information archives. The tools that they need to carry out such interactions will be united under a common interface, as natural and as as powerful as the WWW browser upon which it is based. As technical limitations are removed, the collaborations will be more productive than before, with less stress on the individuals involved. Researchers will meet people with similar interests while working in the elabs, and new partnerships will be formed. The electronic networked space will make a new form of people networking possible, promoting and enhancing the state of scientific research in this country. By the completion of this project, a system will be in place that will allow all of the national laboratories to be on-line, sharing their resources with scientists around the world.
Current systems show that this is indeed possible. Many previous projects, such as Xerox PARC's ``Media Space'' [Bly93] and the University of Toronto's ``CAVECAT'' [Mant91], have investigated how people work together when given the opportunity to share a media space, or electronic place. The results of all these experiments have been encouraging and educational, yet their user population has been limited to those at the few sites participating in the experiment. In LabSpace, we propose to build an infrastructure that will open up the electronic laboratories to any qualified personnel in any location. The scale of the project and the number of participants will necessarily be larger than previous collaborative projects.
Other wide-area distributed projects do exist. The most notable of these is the ground-breaking MBone [Erik94] effort, which utilizes the multicast capabilities of TCP/IP to create audio and video sessions shared by users world-wide. However, these projects are focusing on the technical aspects of the multicast implementation and on specific tools to exploit the potential. These tools can be used for interaction between people, but they are unwieldy and have limited use. Their focus is not on the scientist and his environment, but rather on the features of the specific tool. These tools are essential, and have a place within LabSpace, but they don't solve the collaboration problem.
LabSpace focuses on the user. It creates a natural interactive environment capable of supporting any tools needed for joint research. It defines an open architectural framework that encompasses existing standards such as the MBone technology and the World Wide Web information structure, combining these in unique ways that will enhance natural collaboration.
The high-level LabSpace environment is based on examples of MOO networked spaces that, while primitive, have been shown to be quite useful for researchers spread across time and space. BioMOO [Eric94] and InfoPark [Evar93] are example of these environments, which, respectively, bring together biologists and systems administrators into a text-based space. Jupiter [Curt93], a project currently under development at Xerox PARC, extends MOO with video, audio, and windowing capabilities, with the goal of creating a virtual workplace for a set of workgroups within an organization, a target which is similar to the LabSpace goal. If Jupiter is released for public use, LabSpace will build on top of the base provided by Jupiter, adding support for history mechanisms, protocol merging, and scientific instruments, to name a few. Otherwise, LabSpace will use currently available MOO technology, combining the concept of a networked space with graphical tools, high-end interfaces, and the best available security mechanisms.
Thus, we propose to create a National Electronic Laboratory Infrastructure. We will start the work with several testbeds:
The participants in LabSpace bring together a uniquely strong set of abilities. The high performance computing environment, strong software development history, and visionary leadership of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory will focus and organize the project.
The Materials Science Division of ANL brings to the project world-class facilities, expertise in electron microscopy and microanalysis, and a large local, national, and international user base distributed across government, commercial, and educational labs.
Northeastern University brings several years of virtual environment development and design to the project. The Electronic Visualization Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Chicago is an acknowledged leader in the field of revolutionary interface design. Together, these government and educational institutions have a unique set of skills and resources that will combine to make LabSpace, and distributed collaboration, a success.