Gareth Smith

Exploiting context to support social awareness and social navigation

The utilization of context (such as user location and user profile) opens up many new avenues for encouraging social interaction. The web-based GUIDE system enables visitors to the city of Lancaster to interact with an information model that represents the city via a hand-held and context-aware tourist guide. Our current work is focusing on extending the functionality of the (previously single user) GUIDE system by making parts of the information model public. In particular, the physical location of visitors can now be represented in the information space in order to enable a form of social awareness among city visitors. In addition, visitors can also change the information space by, for example, augmenting existing descriptions of the citys attractions with their own ratings. We believe that explicitly capturing and tagging the context associated with ratings provides a powerful mechanism for automatically tailoring information presented to the user.

The COVEN Project: Exploring Applicative, Technical, and Usage Dimensions of Collaborative Virtual Environments

COVEN (Collaborative Virtual Environments) is a European project that seeks to develop a comprehensive approach to the issues in the development of collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. COVEN brings together twelve academic and industrial partners with a wide range of expertise in CSCW, networked VR, computer graphics, human factors, HCI, and telecommunications infrastructures. After two years of work, we are presenting the main features of our approach and results, our driving applications, the main components of our technical investigations, and our experimental activities. With different citizen and professional application scenarios as driving forces, COVEN is exploring the requirements and supporting techniques for collaborative interaction in scalable CVEs. Technical results are being integrated in an enriched networked VR platform based on the dVS and DIVE systems. Taking advantage of a dedicated Europe-wide ISDN and ATM network infrastructure, a large component of the project is a trial and experimentation activity that should allow a comprehensive understanding of the network requirements of these systems as well as their usability issues and human factors aspects.

An Overview of the COVEN Platform

A central aim of the COVEN project was to prototype large-scale applications of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that went beyond the existing state of the art. These applications were used in a series of real-scale networked trials that allowed us to gather many interesting human and technological results. To fulfill the technological and experimental goals of the project, we have modified an existing CVE platform: the DIVE (distributed interactive virtual environment) toolkit. In this paper, we present the different services and extensions that have been implemented within the platform during the four years of the project. Such a presentation will exemplify the different features that will have to be offered by nextgeneration CVE platforms. Implementation of the COVEN services has had implications at all levels of the platform: from a new networking layer through to mechanisms for high-level semantic modeling of applications.

WEBPATH-a three dimensional Web history

A number of usability studies report that many users of the WWW cannot find pages already visited, additionally many users cannot visualise where they are, or where they have been browsing. Currently, readily available WWW browsers provide history mechanisms that offer little or no support in the presentation and manipulation of visited sites. Manipulation and presentation of usage data, such as a browse history has been used in a number of cases to aid users in searching for previously attained data, and to teach or assist other users in their browse or searching techniques. The paper presents a virtual reality (VR) based application to be used alongside traditional Web browsers, which provides them with a flexibly tailorable real time visualisation of their history.

Supporting collaborative learning during information searching

We consider the role of collaborative learning during information searching. We report on observations of situated collaboration in a physical library, which informed the development of our system, Ariadne. This was intended both to investigate and support the learning of search skills. An iterative development and testing methodology was applied. The system has a mechanism for recording an interaction history of the search process. A visualisation of this process makes it easier for users to reflect, share and comment upon their understanding with others.

Cooperative virtual environments: lessons from 2D multi user interfaces

Existing Cooperative Virtual Environments present the same shared world to each of the cooperating users. This is analogous to the use of strict-WYSIWIS in early 2D interfaces. Research in the area of shared 2D interfaces has shown a strong trend to support individual tailoring of the shared views, and move away from the strict-WYSIWIS abstraction. This paper argues that the development of Cooperative Virtual Environments can gain from the experience of research into in shared 2D interface systems, and presents a model to manage the use of subjective views in Cooperative Virtual Environments.

The role of shared context in supporting cooperation between city visitors

The sharing of contextual information between individuals is a notion that often sparks emotional debate. It is interesting to note that the majority of existing work on sharing contextual information, especially location, has focused on the privacy issues raised in the work domain. This paper describes our initial investigation into sharing context in the leisure domain. More specifically we investigate how location context may be usefully shared between city visitors. For example, visitors may benefit by (i) knowing the whereabouts of family members, or (ii) determining the popularity of attractions based on the number of visits. Additionally the sharing of location might also encourage communication between visitors that are not exploring the city as part of a group. For example, noticing that a fellow GUIDE user is located at the city castle would be helpful if I could then contact the visitor to request his or her opinion of the castle.

The London Travel Demonstrator

Travel can be a stressful experience and it is an activity that is difficult to prepare for in advance. Although maps, routes and landmarks can be memorised, travellers do not get much sense of the spatial layout of the destination and can easily get confused when they arrive. There is little doubt that virtual environments techniques can assist in such situations, by, for example, providing walkthroughs of virtual cityscapes to effect route learning. The London Travel Demonstrator supports travellers by providing an environment where they can explore London, utilise group collaboration facilities, rehearse particular journeys and access tourist information data. These services are built on the Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) software from SICS. In this paper we describe how the application was built, how it exploits the underlying collaboration services, and how the platform provides for scaleability both in terms of the large extent and detail of this application and in the number of participants it can support.

The FUSE Platform: Supporting Ubiquitous Collaboration Within Diverse Mobile Environments

The recent proliferation of heterogeneous computing devices and wireless network technology presents new opportunities for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). One emergent paradigm is that of ubiquitous collaboration, which provides widespread access to shared services through a variety of interactive devices, irrespective of whether individuals are mobile or deskbound. However, developing groupware that is interoperable across diverse, often mobile, environments can be difficult and costly. The fundamental issue is that current support infrastructures, which will meet the requirements for multi-user application development, are not operable within emerging ubiquitous settings. This paper explores this problem and presents a generic platform that promotes new forms of collaboration through mobility and ever-present computing services. The developed platform seeks to provide a wide range of collaborative services to a very diverse set of devices by adapting and extending existing middleware technologies.

Using subjective views to enhance 3D applications

Visualisations of virtual worlds by current Cooperative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are identical for each user, albeit from a different viewpoint. Users cannot tailor their representation of the virtual scene or the degree to which they are aware of other user’s activities. This paper describes the implementation of a mechanism to support subjective views of shared virtual worlds, and describes how this mechanism is utilised to enhance an existing 3D application.