Masahide Shinozaki

Collaborative customer services using synchronous Web browser sharing

For complicated transactions and inexptienced users, se~-smite may not be *cimL b addition, for marketing and sales, there maybe no substitute fm a good salesperson. Thus, there is tiue in combining ~chronous am to products and services OVHthe Web with Wchronous, human assistance v’hen needd h ord~ to pr~ vide better service to customas, increase d=, and ~erentiate their Webbased services tiom the repetition, a numbs of businesses are starting to fiTlore means of integrating Eve customs service into their Web sites.

CollaborationFramework: a toolkit for sharing existing single-user applications without modification

There are two conventional approaches to building synchronous collaborative applications: collaboration unaware and collaboration-aware. Though the unaware approach, realized by graphic level synchronization, has an advantage in that it does not require any modification of the original single user applications, it makes it difficult to support groupware specific operations. On the other hand, the aware approach makes it possible to include such features, but only at the cost of rewriting the original application. Our CollaborationFramework provides a platform that is unique in combining the two approaches. It supports construction of an aware external program for controlling the original software application. The scheme is useful for the type of applications in which interfaces for querying and setting the internal status are well defined. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach by making off-the-shelf WWW browsers into a shared version with groupware specific synchronization capability.

Interactive Web forms based on assistance rules

The paper describes techniques for developing assistance functions for Web form input operations. The techniques allow developers to define input-assistance functions as a set of assistance rules. The assistance rules are converted into a program that implements the assistance functions defined in the rules by a software module called a rule compiler. The program is embedded into a Web form to monitor a users input operations on a Web browser and to provide assistance functions such as help-message displays, validation checks of input values, and automatic inputs in accord with the users input operations. By defining assistance functions as a set of assistance rules, developers can implement interactive Web forms without any complicated script programming. Therefore, it is possible to rapidly prototype assistance functions and reduce the development cost of the interactive Web forms.

Cooperative annotation on remote real objects

In normal desktop conferencing systems, it is difficult to cooperatively work with real objects in real time. In our system, a user can easily work with remote users, because remote users can draw annotation onto real objects from remote sites, move and erase the annotation dynamically. Remote users can overwrite the annotation on a video window, and the annotation is displayed on real object at the same position as in the video window by using projection. In a local site, a user can manipulate the real objects looking annotation from a remote site. We have made a prototype system based on a multimedia conferencing system called ConverStatison/2[l]. In this paper, we describe the system configuration and the result of experiment in detail.