Elizabeth F. Churchill

Anchored conversations: chatting in the context of a document

This paper describes an application-independent tool called Anchored Conversations that brings together text-based conversations and documents. The design of Anchored Conversations is based on our observations of the use of documents and text chats in collaborative settings. We observed that chat spaces support work conversations, but they do not allow the close integration of conversations with work documents that can be seen when people are working together face-to-face. Anchored Conversations directly addresses this problem by allowing text chats to be anchored into documents. Anchored Conversations also facilitates document sharing; accepting an invitation to an anchored conversation results in the document being automatically uploaded. In addition, Anchored Conversations provides support for review, catch-up and asynchronous communications through a database. In this paper we describe motivating fieldwork, the design of Anchored Conversations, a scenario of use, and some preliminary results from a user study.

Collaborative virtual environments: An introductory review of issues and systems

A Collaborative Virtual Environment or CVE is a distributed, virtual reality that is designed to support collaborative activities. As such, CVEs provide a potentially infinite, graphically realised digital landscape within which multiple users can interact with each other and with simple or complex data representations. CVEs are increasingly being used to support collaborative work between geographically separated and between collocated collaborators. CVEs vary in the sophistication of the data and embodiment representations employed and in the level of interactivity supported. It is clear that systems which are intended to support collaborative activities should be designed with explicit consideration of the tasks to be achieved and the intended users social and cognitive characteristics. In this paper, we detail a number of existing systems and applications, but first discuss the nature of collaborative and cooperative work activities and consider the place of virtual reality systems in supporting such collaborative work. Following this, we discuss some future research directions.

Sharing multimedia content with interactive public displays: a case study

Plasma Posters are large screen, digital, interactive poster-boards situated in public spaces, designed to facilitate informal content sharing within teams, groups, organizations and communities. While interest i interactive community poster boards has grown recently, few successful examples have been reported. In this paper we describe an ongoing installation of Plasma Posters within our organization, and report qualitative and quantitative data from 20 months of use showing the Posters have become an integral part of information sharing, complementing email and Web-based sharing. Success factors include our design process, the reliability and flexibility of the technology and the social setting of our organization. We briefly describe three external installations of the Plasma Poster Network in public places. We then reflect on content posting as information staging and the ways in which the public space itself becomes part of the interface to content.

Collaborative Virtual Environments

We present extensions to research done at UNC in 3D object warping for collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). 3D objects are dynamically distorted in various ways to give visual cues to the users of a CVE about the actions that are being applied to the objects. Some warps occur with single-user actions; others happen when several users interact with one object collaboratively. We generalize the object warping methods to define 3D user interface techniques we generically call 3D sliders, meaning 3D objects that can be used to inject control information into programs. Unlike sliders in 1D, where the graphical image presents an analog to a physical control, we generalized the notion in both dimensions and in format/style. We do 3D sliders by warping the original object shapes, allowing their forms to retain their original representational value as well. The result is more than 3 degrees of control freedom in 3-space.

Digital graffiti: public annotation of multimedia content

Our physical environment is increasingly filled with multimedia content on situated, community public displays. We are designing methods for people to post and acquire digital information to and from public digital displays, and to modify and annotate previously posted content to create publicly observable threads. We support in-the-moment and on-site person-to-place-to-people-to-persons content interaction, annotation, augmentation and publication. We draw design inspiration from field work observations of how people remove, modify and mark up paper postings. We present our initial designs in this arena, and some initial user reactions.

It's all in the words: supporting work activites with lightweight tools

The development of tools to support synchronous communications between non-collocated colleagues has received considerable attention in recent years. Much of the work has focused on increasing a sense of co-presence between interlocutors by supporting aspects of face-to-face conversations that go beyond mere words (e.g. gaze, postural shifts). In this regard, a design goal for many environments is the provision of as much media-richness as possible to support non-collocated communication. In this paper we present results from our most recent interviews studying the use of a text-based virtual environment to support work collaborations. We describe how such an environment, though lacking almost all the visual and auditory cues known to be important in face-to-face conversation, has played an important role in day-to-day communication. We offer a set of characteristics we feel are important to the success of this text-only tool and discuss issues emerging from its long-term use.

Virtual environments at work: ongoing use of MUDs in the workplace

In recent years much attention has been paid to network-based, distributed environments like text-based MUDs and MOOs for supporting collaborative work. Such environments offer a shared virtual world in which interactions can take place irrespective of the actual physical proximity or distance of interactants. Although these environments have proven successful within social, recreational and educational domains, few data have been reported concerning use of such systems in the workplace. In this paper we summarize in-depth interviews with 8 MUDders from a software research and development community where a MUD has been operational and actively used for a number of years. The interviews suggest that the MUD fills a valuable communication niche for this workgroup, being used both synchronously and asynchronously to enable the establishment of new contacts and the maintenance of existing contacts. These observations are discussed in the context of the organization under study.

Multimedia fliers: information sharing with digital community bulletin boards

Community poster boards serve an important community building function. Posted fliers advertise services, events and peoples interests, and invite community members to communicate, participate, interact and transact. In this paper we describe the design, development and deployment of several large screen, digital community poster boards, the Plasma Posters, within our organization. We present our motivation, two fleldwork studies of online and offline information sharing, and design guidelines derived from our observations. After introducing the Plasma Posters and the underlying information storage and distribution infrastructure, we illustrate their use and value within our organization, summarizing findings from qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We conclude by elaborating socio-technical challenges we have faced in our design and deployment process.

Blending digital and physical spaces for ubiquitous community participation

Blurring the notional boundary between the digital and the physical in social activity spaces helps blend---and motivate---online and face-to-face community participation.

Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Spaces and Places for CSCW: An Introduction

In the late 1980s Virtual Reality (VR) burst onto the public stage propelled by a wave of media interest and related science fiction novels such as Neuromancer by William Gibson (Gibson, 1989). VR promised to revolutionize the way in which we experience and interact with computers, and research into the field mushroomed. More recently, the hype surrounding VR has died down and, although it is receiving less public attention, serious work is continuing with the aim of producing useful and usable technology. At the centre of current work related to VR is the field of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). This field has as its goal the provision of new, more effective means of using computers as tools for communication and information sharing with others. Many CVE systems have been constructed. Some of these are desktop systems and applications; but large public virtual spaces have also been constructed (such as Alpha World at http://www.activeworlds.com/; see Chapter 15). CVEs are also being used to experiment with new forms of art and interactive television (Benford et al., 1997a,b; Benford et al, 2000a).