Paper Reading #13: TwinSpace: an Infrastructure for Cross-Reality Team Spaces

Comments

Reference information
Authors: Derek F. Reilly, Hafez Rouzati, Andy Wu, Jee Yeon Hwang, Jeremy Brudvik, W. Keith Edwards
Where: UIST 2010, October 3–6, 2010, New York, New York, USA

Summary
This paper explores turning any physical workspace into a collaborative virtual workspace, regardless of location. Many collaborative, group workspaces are usable only for people in the same area, or those in separate locations. This limits interaction, so the designers developed TwinSpace, a software infrastructure that includes both aspects to create virtual spaces that are connected through physical smart space and that remote collaborators can join. This permits many actions disallowed by virtual spaces alone, allowing remote workers to have more available actions. TwinSpace realizes cross-reality environments by incorporating: a communications layer that seamlessly links event-notifications in the virtual space with those in the physical space; a common model for both physical and virtual spaces; a mapping capability, managing synchronization between physical and virtual spaces; and specialized virtual world clients that participate fully in the larger ecology of collaborative cross-reality devices and services.

Events that occur in either the physical or virtual world can be published in the other world, allowing for easy collaboration. People in the physical space are also represented in the virtual space, and multiple rooms can be connected to a single virtual space at the same time. TwinSpace's architecture consists of the OpenWonderland platform, for the virtual world engine, and Event Heap, a simple and flexible communications platform that permits the creation of a wide range of room-level interactive capabilities and services.

Two case studies were discussed that use TwinSpace. The first created a virtual team collaboration room that supports two high-level activities or modes: brainstorm mode configures the three regions of the room to support idea generation and group decision-making, and present mode provides facilities for in-room or remote users to give a presentation or guide a discussion with other participants. The study was conducted at weekly meetings with users in industry and was used successfully, with some issues that could be improved, such as the lack of virtual representation of their in-room counterparts. The second study implemented a collaborative game in an 18th Century French colonial fort, where two pairs, French and British sides, compete for valuables distributed throughout the town. Evaluation regarding this study was not mentioned.

Discussion
I thought this was a pretty interesting concept, though the paper was somewhat lengthy for its contribution. This is probably the first paper I've read where physical and virtual worlds are combined to create collaborative workspaces. The implementation wasn't as clear as it could have been, and I thought the description of the collaborative game for the second user study was unnecessary and should have included user evaluation. Still, TwinSpace would work very well in industry and other work environments to facilitate interaction across the world.