Product Description
In an era when increasing numbers of people are conducting research and interacting with one another through the internet, the study of ‘Inhabited Information Spaces’ is aimed at encouraging a more fruitful exchange between the users, and the digital data they are accessing. Introducing the new and developing field of Inhabited Information Spaces, this book covers all types of collaborative systems including virtual environments and more recent innovations such as hybrid and augmented real-world systems. Divided into separate sections, each covering a different aspect of Inhabited Information Systems, this book includes: How best to design and construct social work spaces; analysis of how users interact with existing systems, and the technological and sociological challenges designers face; How Inhabited Information Spaces are likely to evolve in the future and the new communities that they will create.
From the Author
The goal of Inhabited Information Spaces is to create real and virtual environments in which people can work and collaborate. Many studies of co-operative working have shown that even when co-operation is not explicit a surprisingly large amount of work relies on the knowledge of what other people are doing so that work can be co-ordinated. Inhabited Information Spaces (IIS) therefore combine techniques such as real & augmented virtual realities with techniques for promoting communicating and awareness of the actions of other people working with the same information. If the field of information visualisation is concerned with how to represent information, the field of IIS is concerned with how to represent information and people's activities in a unified way - recognising that sometimes know who is working with information and what they are doing with it can be as important as, or more important than, the information itself.
Much of the work described in this book results from a experiment by the European Commission which created a community of researchers working in this field (and also "Connected Communities") on several different cutting edge research projects. This book presents some of the lessons learned from these projects and the results achieved together with invited chapters from leading researchers in the field.
