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.
About the Author
Dr. David Snowdon, joined Xerox Research Centre Europe's Grenoble laboratory in February 1998. His research interests include novel user interfaces, information visualization, the software architectures of collaborative virtual environments and software development. He worked on the i3 project Campiello which explored novel user interfaces for sharing cultural information in communities. Before joining XRCE he spent 4 years working at the Communications Research Group at the University of Nottingham during which time he built a number of prototype collaborative visualization applications, worked on the design and implementation of a scalable collaborative virtual environment and was involved with the staging of 2 VR based public arts performances. Together with Elizabeth Churchill he has also co-chaired three international conferences on the subject of collaborative virtual environments (CVE'96, CVE'98 & ACM CVE2000) and co-edited the book "Collaborative Virtual Environments : Digital Spaces and Places for Interaction" which has been published by Springer-Verlag, UK.
Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a senior research scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. (FXPAL) working on the design and use of computer based tools to support collaborative activities. Her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge focused on the design, development and evaluation of computational models of cognition and action. Following that, she was a post doctoral research fellow and lecturer at the University of Nottingham, UK, in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science and Information Technology, researching and teaching in Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction. With Dave Snowdon, she recently co-organised the ACM's Conference on Collaborative Virtual Environments, an interdisciplinary event drawing researchers from computer science, business management, education, psychology, HCI, CSCW and critical theory. She has published extensively within the areas of cognitive psychology, human computer interaction and computer supported collaborative work. She has co-edited several conference proceedings and two books: the first, Embodied Conversational Agents was published in 2000 by MIT press, and the second, Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Places and Spaces for Interaction was published by Springer-Verlag in March 2001.
Emmanuel Frécon received his M.Sc. degree from the National Institute of Applied Science, Lyon, France, in May 1993. He spent his last year of studies as an ERASMUS student at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where he presented his thesis on the integration of teleconferencing facilities in a virtual environment. He has been working at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science since august 1994. In 1999, he was appointed head of the Platforms for Collaborative Environments (PlaCE) group. His main research interest is the design and implementation of collaborative virtual environments systems, with a focus on distribution issues and application support. He is one of the main architects of the DIVE system.
