This is a project idea and proposal for a Human-Computer Interaction design project in the Stanford iRoom. It is for Stanford students to work on during the Summer 2001 Quarter. Please contact me via email if you are interested in this project. Thanks!
A group of designers are sitting in a technology-augmented environment such as the Stanford iRoom. They are holding a brainstorming session. One person is standing in front of a high-resolution, wall-size display (the Mural) and developing the main brainstorming list or concept map as the discussion progresses. Other designers around the room are scribbling their own annotations and sketches onto personal interactive pads, and can send these annotations and sketches up to the main brainstorming document. The entire work session on the Mural is captured on a stroke level, so that it can later be played back to recreate the experience.
If you are interested in the development side, programming expertise in Java or C++ is very helpful in order to be able to extend and build upon the existing PostBrainstorm application. Knowledge of OpenGL would be beneficial since PostBrainstorm currently does all its rendering in this graphics model. We are also interested in someone with graphical user interface design and evaluation skills to help us in this project. In any case, understanding of Human-Computer Interaction principles can help you to make user-centered design decisions in this project that result in a useful and usable system.
After getting an overview of existing systems that allow this type of collaborative editing by doing some literature research, we define a more detailed scenario, create some initial low-fidelity prototypes, and get feedback from real designers (possible from Steelcase) about how useful they find the feature set of our system. We then continue to build a running system that offers the features described in the above scenario (as influenced by the prototype feedback).
The Mural hardware and some LCD screens with built-in high-resolution graphics tablets exist (having used one of these, you'll never want to go back to a mouse :-) ); as well as the PostBrainstorm software to sketch, write annotations, and organize objects on the Mural itself and log those activities. The missing link is the software to run on the computers driving the individual tablets, which will need to let users draw sketches and annotations and send them to the main Mural as recordable stroke sequences. Some source code exists that offers some of these features alreadyc (early PostBrainstorm extensions, Squeak), which may help to start implementing our own GroupStorm software.
Hans Andersen <http://www.stanford.edu/~hca5/>: Prototyping, software design and development
Jeff Raymakers <http://www.stanford.edu/~jeph/>: Prototyping, software design and development
Jan Borchers <http://www.stanford.edu/~borchers/>: Project advisor
Tom Nguyen: Discussing Post-PostBrainstorm: Single-Display Groupware (overview of existing research projects, Summer 2001 research presentation)
Jeff & Hans: Prototype Definition
Jan: Alpha & beta software releases (user name and password required)
See Hans' and Jeff's GroupStorm log pages.
Jan Borchers <borchers@stanford.edu> • Last modified Feb 12, 2002