The ACRC e-World Lab is providing the basis for a range of collaborative research activities in the area of future workspace environments involving staff and students from the ACRC and DSTO. Projects include:

1. LiveSpaces
   
2. Architectures and Infrastructure for Enterprise Enabled Ubiquitous Workspaces
   
3. Universal Interaction and Control in Multi Display Environments
   
4. InVision
   
5. Plexus: Interactive Coordination Interface for Ubiquitous Workspaces
   
6. Workspace Simulation: Developing Virtual LiveSpaces using Workspace Simulation
   

LiveSpaces is an overarching project that is addressing how physical spaces such as meeting rooms can be augmented with a range of display technologies, personal information appliances, speech and natural language interfaces, interaction devices and contextual sensors to provide for future interactive/intelligent workspaces. New software infrastructure will provide the basis for integrating, controlling and coordinating activities and technologies within these future workspace environments. Enterprise-level infrastructure will provide for the integration and synchronisation of multiple collaborating workspace environments.

Our approach is to incrementally integrate a range of technologies and research results into an experimental LiveSpaces infrastructure through a series of directed project cycles. The current LiveSpace environment has been set up with modular furniture that can be configured for various types of activities including meetings, briefings, planning sessions etc. The facility hosts a Smart Board display and interaction device, a wireless LAN that provides infrastructure for mobile computing devices, and X10 devices/controllers to allow the controlling of various LiveSpace devices such as projectors and lights. A range of software infrastructure is available including Stanford’s interactive Room Operating System (iROS), MIT’s MetaGlue (a multiagent intelligent room infrastructure), DSTC’s Open Distributed Systems Infrastructure (an enterprise-level infrastructure which comprises and enterprise bus, workflow support, and enterprise adapters/peers), speech engines, visualisation tools etc.

This project focuses on the challenge of providing the underlying architectures and software infrastructure for future workspace environments and associated workspace applications. As with individual workstations, which require an operating system to coordinate and run applications, ubiquitous computing applications will require an underlying operating environment. Research is well underway in various laboratories to more fully understand what this underlying infrastructure should be. In this project, we begin to explore how the infrastructure for these interactive environments might be extended and integrated i nto broader enterprise-level solutions. We look at various archetypes such as multiagent systems, tupple space approaches, and publish/subscribe mechanisms.

Researchers: Terence Blackburn, Rudi Vernik, Damien Bright

In this project, our research focuses on interaction within future workspaces where physical spaces such as meeting rooms are augmented with ubiquitous computing infrastructure and various group and personal display technologies, Of particular interest are future command environments which will employ a variety of displays and interaction modalities. These environments are being designed to allow for more timely and better decisions by smaller numbers of command staff supported by remote specialist staff and intelligent applications. Of key importance is the ability to rapidly provide situation information in ways that will allow commanders to quickly decide on a course of action in response to a multitude of threats. Natural and efficient information interaction methods need to be developed to allow commanders and command staff to effectively interact with the various forms of information that support decision-making processes.

Researchers: Hannah Slay, Bruce Thomas, Rudi Vernik

InVision is a project initiated by DSTO to support research into approaches for the rapid assembly and deployment of information visualisation solutions. It forms the basis for several ACRC projects including the research into Universal Interaction and Control in Multidisplay Environments, 3D Augmented Reality Views, and other student projects.

A key goal of InVision is to facilitate the integration and coordination of a wide variety of disparate information visualisation view types through the research, design and prototype development of an open, component-based software architecture hosted on the Java 2 platform. InVision uses the concept of workspaces to support the management and integration of views for particular individuals or roles. These views specify how the information in an underlying composite model will be represented. InVision composite models can be thought of as attributed graphs that capture information about a set of 'things', the various relationships between these 'things', and sets of attributes that describe the 'things' (eg size, colour, name). The modelling approach is generic and so can be used to support the visualisation of a wide variety of artefacts such as software systems, intranets, organisational structures, social networks, or financial systems.

Project Page

Researchers: Rudi Vernik, Hannah Slay, Matthew Phillips

The LiveSpaces Project within e-World Lab is experimenting with the augmentation of physical spaces (such as meeting rooms) with ubiquitous computing technologies to provide the basis for the rapid development of future Interactive Intelligent Workspaces. These future workspaces will use ubiquitous computing infrastructure to support natural interaction between people, technologies and media. In these environments computing applications will move from being hosted on workstations to being hosted within physical spaces such as meeting rooms.

This work extends research undertaken at Stanford University in the development of operating environments for ubiquitous computing rooms. For example, Stanford researchers have developed the concept of a room controller. The proposed project is based on work undertaken by e-World Lab intern students during the summer 02/03 to extend the concept of a room controller into a full desktop-type metaphor for an interactive intelligent workspace. For example, Plexus would allow users to control various devices such as lights, projectors through a graphical representation of the room as is done by the i-Crafer Room Controller. It would also allow drag and drop capabilities to, for example, associate particular files/information/media with one of the many room devices (eg large screen display, Tablet PC, etc) and have it presented by way of an appropriate application. For example, a user might drag a Powerpoint file from Plexus (displayed on their table PC) to a smartboard display for presentation. Other participants might use Plexus to have the same file be presented on their own Tablet PC so that they can view the presentations notes or look ahead. Other aspects to be explored include the concept of a room clipboard.

Project page

Supervisors: Rudi Vernik, Damien Bright
Students: Vivian Nguyen, Aaron Stafford

Augmented Synchronised Planning Spaces (AUSPLANS) draws from, and extends, the LiveSpaces work to investigate how these future workspaces, or LiveSpaces, can be used to support multiple synchronised teams engaged in military planning within future headquarters environments. The aim is to evaluate LiveSpace approaches and technologies in relation to the various planning scenarios. A major problem in undertaking these types of studies is the cost of establishing, staffing, and controlling multiple workspaces for experimentation. Workspace simulation aims to reduce some of these problems by providing virtual workspaces that simulate the work processes and work practices of specialist teams. These virtual LiveSpaces are used together with real LiveSpaces to provide an overall experimentation environment.

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Supervisors: Damien Bright, Rudi Vernik
Students: Steven Johnson