Take a look at the wonderful Immersive Workspaces from Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red. Wonderful because it’s a great piece of work and a real breakthrough, but also because it’s not done yet. That is, if its goal is as stated “a complete collaboration solution”, and “the ultimate destination in real-time collaboration”.

Immersive Workspaces - avatars view slides in a virtual meeting room

You see, what they’ve built looks like a great solution for real-time communication and coordination – but that’s not the same thing as collaboration. Let’s take a look. I’ll wait here while you watch the the video.

The system provides the following task-oriented headings: News, Team, Meetings, Actions, Media, Journal, Stats, Admin, and Go 3D. This is looking like the next generation of groupware, with that last link promising a sprinkle of social avatar-chat sugar on top, courtesy of Second Life.

The use case shown is called a “collaboration session” – but let’s look at what the participants (Laura, Adam and Sakura) actually do.

1. Laura and Adam don headsets, sit down at PCs and log on. They can now talk to each other and see their avatars.
2. Their avatars enter a virtual presentation room, with chairs oriented toward a representation of a projection screen.
3. Sakura’s avatar appears, joining the chat: “Sorry to keep you waiting. I’ve just uploaded my slides for us to take a look at”.
4. The avatars appear to look at the slides and discuss them.So far we have communication. Note that the “real work” – preparing and uploading the slides – was done before entering the virtual world.
5. Adam is asked to add something to the presentation. He exits the virtual world, from his point of view: he’s now working full-screen on the presentation while his avatar stays in the virtual room.
6. Now the magic – Adam’s changes appear on the projection screen within the virtual presentation room.Here we have something new – a moment of actual collaboration. However note that if Sakura and Laura wanted to join Adam in editing the presentation they would both have to exit the virtual world as well, moving over to screen sharing.Now we return to the virtual world, and with it we shift back from collaboration to coordination.
7. Laura approves the changes, and directs Adam and Sakura to perform various tasks outside the virtual world. In the video we can see them nod their heads in assent – invisibly to Laura, though.

Adam exits the virtual environment to work on a document

Taken as a whole then, Immersive Workspaces is a collaboration solution. It’s interesting to see the dividing lines emerge: Communication takes place in the virtual world, collaboration in the bundled screen-sharing application, and everything’s coordinated in the bundled groupware.While in the immersive virtual world participants ignore the real world. When they leave it to use something else (like screen sharing) they maintain the sense of shared place by pretending that they’re still there.

The design of the virtual environment reinforces this implicit division; it’s a seminar room. The slides are up on a presentation screen, to be shown rather than collaboratively manipulated. All this is ideal for communicating ideas but it’s not a place that particularly affords active collaboration.

I think there are other designs that can remove this divide, and the focus on immersion is in the way of realising those designs. On this blog I hope to show you what I mean.

I recently posted an idea for ad-hoc workspace sharing for under $US 500/person. The idea is simple: get one of the new LED-based micro projectors, tape it to a webcam and point them at a surface. Then everything the camera sees can be projected back onto the same surface, or more interestingly to a remote setup along the same lines. Now two people at different locations can share a workspace.

When figuring out how to prototype this, I then thought of the ubiquitous angle-poise task lamp. Apparently Anglepoise is actually a brand, which I did not know – it’s the true original, designed by George Carwardine in the UK in 1934. It’s this lamp that Jac Jacobsen found in a shipment of sewing machines, licensed and redesigned in 1937, resulting in the classic Luxo L-1 luminaire. Some version of this architects’ lamp then inspired John Lasseter to animate Luxo Jr., the short film that became the spirit of Pixar.

Now, I’m going for low-cost, ad-hoc and ubiquitous. I’m not going to use a $200 Luxo L-1 or Anglepoise Original 1227. Not unless I find a new source of funding, anyway In any case, it’s more appropriate for me to use the most low-cost, ubiquitous version of this superbly functional modern design: IKEA’s TERTIAL. $18.95 from my local IKEA in Sydney, $8.99 in the US.

The height is perfect to throw a 30cm/12″ diagonal display from the 3M MPRO110 Micro Projector, and if you remove the lamp assembly the projector fits beautifully in its place, with room to spare for a webcam. Here’s my blueprint and a shot of the design in situ. If you make one too, we can try them out.

Next is to design and implement some user interaction methods. One quite nice thing is that the field of view of the camera is wider than the lightfield of the projector. This means that we can use the projected area for direct manipulation of things in the mediaspace, and use the area around it as a gestural interaction zone for anything that effects the mediaspace as a whole. Some sketches:

and

3M MPRO110 Micro Projector: $US 300

= $USD 449 (= $AUD 626) plus something for shipping.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt1_4Hr_-FA

Tape them together, point them at a surface in arm’s reach, set up a screen-sharing videoconference with someone else with the same setup, and you can share a projected workspace. Cheap, fast and adaptable.

To use or to simulate the seal is not permitted… but why merely simulate, when you can beat reality at its own game? Enter the hyperreal.

Or indeed, the hyper-seal. Forget staid heraldry. This shield is a 3D object protruding into the space. Not a depiction, a virtualisation.  The eagle is… surfing on the shield? Surmounting it, anyway, and crushing the arrows and the olive branch beneath its talons. Instead of “E Puribus Unum” (Out of Many, One), we have THE UNION AND THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER, like a sailor’s tattoo.

This eagle says I MADED YOU A GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE BUT I EATED IT.

Update: now tracking this project at Sky Blue.

The depth of his research is compelling him to dive down into evolutionary psychology, just to find a place to stand… bringing in references from Leda Cosmides [wp], Jared Diamond [wp] and Stephen Pinker [wp]. A PhD is certainly a great excuse to do some absorbing reading.

After the talk we got into an engrossing discussion of  hermetically sealed virtual realities (silly) vs. mixed reality (marvellous), mind/body dualism (outmoded) vs. holism (somewhat more sensible) and absolute transhumanism (fun but overblown) vs. whatever is actually going on (much more complicated, and even more fun). Doug saw an early sketch of the mixed-reality piece I’m currently installing down at the Powerhouse Museum, so I’m hoping to get the computer vision part of it working properly before he heads back to NZ at the end of the week. More about that in another blog post

Prototyping for Game Feel (v.2)

Including the faboulous step 3:

• Be Shigeru Miyamoto

There’s a nice thoughtful post here (and the rest of the site looks worth a read as well). What caught my eye was the description of Miyamoto’s virtual garden:

“Before any of the levels had been created Mr. Miyamoto had Mario running around and picking up objects in a small ‘garden’ which he uses in all his games to test gameplay elements.”

Miyamoto is noted for finding inspiration for his game designs from his other interests: playing the guitar and gardening. The gamecube game “Pimkin” was based directly on Miyamoto’s actual garden. So for him, it seems that the virtual and real garden are his ba – his own place, a creative source.