An Interaction Metaphor

LabSpace creates persistent virtual locations on the network where people can interact in natural ways. The spaces are organized around centers of interest such as the National Collaboratories. They are created in a flexible and extensible manner, allowing them to be modified according to the project's needs. A researcher is able to enter a location and interact with the people and objects located within the space.

Jane logged in from home the next morning to check her mail and see what was up at the elab. In her office at the elab, she looked at the readout on her desk of the current experiment, which was still happily running. She'd left the door to her office open overnight, and someone had left a yellow sticky note on her desk.
``Jane - your calendar says you can meet at noon today. See you in the meeting room?'' The note was digitally signed by Brian.
``No problem,'' she thought, looking at her elab directory to see who else was currently active.

This paradigm provides endless opportunity for creating natural environments which promote cooperation and interaction. Here are a few examples:

• A room that houses an analytical electron microscope. Located in the room are interfaces to the microscope. When a scientist ``looks'' at the microscope, the corresponding modules are initiated within his session.
• A meeting room adjoining the analytical microscope lab, which people use to gather and make plans, and to store working documents and to chart project progress. The people in this room can interact with each other because they share a multicast video and audio channel related to the room. A white board on the wall is shared by room inhabitants as well. In the first example, Jane and her colleagues were sharing a meeting room.
• A window between the meeting room and the control room, which, in essence, shows a summary view of the experimental equipment being used. It also indicates which control room personnel are active.
• Another meeting room for a different group using the microscope. This room is locked to non-participants because their experiment is confidential.
• A library that acts as an interface to archives of scientific documents. The librarian could be an intelligent agent, a simple index, or even a real librarian. Other scientists using the library may well turn out to be important resources as well.
• Individual offices where people store their current work, and where they go when they aren't actively involved in working with groups. Their presense there may indicate that they are available for casual conversation. Or they may shut their doors, indicating a desire for privacy.
• A viewing lounge that allows guests from the Internet to find out about the experiments in progress without interfering with the work.
• Collaboration ``complexes'' that join collaboratories and scientific projects around the world into one virtual space.

=12cm labspace.slide1.eps

Organizing resources and communication patterns into a spatial paradigm creates an extremely powerful metaphor for interaction. A place is an association between people working together and the objects they're using. This knowledge can be used to coordinate the technical modules which carry out the electronic communication, minimizing the effort required by the scientist to initiate connections and control. More important, it emphasizes the relations between people and allows them to interact casually in a social setting. By simplifying the user interface and making the distributed communication more natural, virtual locations enhance collaborative potential.

Jane walked out to the interaction room, which was usually populated by scientists from around the world taking advantage of scientific journals and the friendly atmosphere. As she entered the room, her terminal listed the journals available and described the people in the room - too bad she didn't have video at home yet, but at least she could still interact with them over audio and text. This time, she recognized a few folks from a group that she knew was working on a long-term experiment at the elab.
``Good morning. How's your project going?'' she asked.
``Quite well, quite well,'' one of them answered. ``Last night we noticed a few anomalies that we don't understand yet, though.''
He pointed to a sketch on the white board, which now appeared on her screen.
``Oh really? Hmmmmmm. We should talk about that.''

Several of these types of spaces are already in existence. AstroVR [Curt93], a collaborative environment at Stanford, uses the MOO server from Xerox PARC to create a virtual laboratory for astronomers. BioMOO [Erik94] brings together biologists from around the world. InfoPark [Evar93] is a similar construction for systems administrators from several different sites. Most of these environments are primarily text-based, yet they are already significantly promoting collaboration. The sociological aspects of these systems are currently being studied, but informal feedback from the user communities is extremely positive.