Paper Reading #12: Twin Space

Comments:

Jessica Gonzales

Patrick Firth

Reference Information:

Title: TwinSpace: an Insfrastructure for Cross-Reality Team Spaces 

Authors: D.F. Reilly, H. Rouzati, A. Wu, J. Y. Hwang, J. Brudvik, W. K. Edwards.

Presentation: (Conference Paper) UIST 2010/2009

Summary: Twin Space is a software infrastructure able to combine interactive workspace with collaborative virtual worlds that allow for remote participants. Smart Spaces have been a topic of research for quiet some years not, providing for spaces that support group work in an interactive environment. However, these spaces are design for collaborative work with all members of the team being in the same physical space. This forms a limitation since remote participants cannot access the technology available in the smart spaces. 

The creators of TwinSpace had the intent of fusing these two settings by creating a balance between both set of participants. They developed a virtual smart space, where remote collaborators can meet and use advanced technology from this virtual space. Their main challenge was how to combine both physical spaces and make the virtual space somewhat similar to the physical one. 

Their development provides four different features to the research being done in this area: a communications layer, a common model, mapping capabilities and the virtual clients for the smart virtual spaces. The developed to implementations of TwinSpace and discuss about their case studies with these two implementations. The first one was an activity mappings implementation, which currently has two modes: a brainstorming mode and a presentation mode as they can be observed in the picture below.

Source

The second case study was a cross-reality collaborative game which places to teams trying to work for a common goal. This prototype focuses on studying the asymmetry in both game controls and team dynamics.

Source

Discussion: When I first started reading this paper I immediately thought about the discussions we've had in class about Second Life. And sure enough, they do mention it later on in the paper. I was also able to picture this like a game, and at the end of the paper they describe the game implementation they developed. I am not a gaming person, but I imagine that if I was to be in a meeting like this one, then I would feel like if I'm in a game... However, I can totally see this as a useful tool since many many organizations are not global and have to interact with people across the world in a daily basis.