Document-centric mixed reality for connecting remote workgroups

This research will mix the physical and digital worlds to connect group workspaces across distances. Building on prior work that used a virtual world to connect remote collaborators to a group in a physical workspace, this research program will consider how an abstract 3-D document space can facilitate group-to-group collaboration involving multiple work surfaces in different physical rooms. For example, digital tabletops in two physical workspaces can be linked in order to share, sort and edit documents, and whiteboards in each room can be linked to promote brainstorming, while the 3-D document space tracks the movement of documents between the linked tabletop and the linked whiteboard, and onto portable devices. Research will determine whether the 3-D document space mitigates the effects of layout differences between connected physical spaces, and provides a "room-agnostic" but spatially-linked way to prepare for collaborative work, record its flow and outcomes. This approach to collaboration across distances does not reduce collaboration to a single display (as with most videoconferencing and desktop groupware), and does not constrain room layout or replace it with an artificial environment to achieve the perception of co-presence (as with most immersive solutions). It promotes ad hoc connectivity between heterogeneous workspaces such as a meeting room and a lab, and allows collaboration between remote teams when environmental awareness is important (e.g., when stock brokers in the head office share sales figures with colleagues who are in a room overlooking the market floor). In a society that increasingly integrates digital technology with the physical world, it is critical to understand how our experience of the built environment impacts technology use. In making the physical layout of collaborative workspaces a research focus, this research program notably extends previous work in digitally-mediated workspaces for remote collaboration, by moving inquiry toward ecologically valid work environments.