Andrew Shultz
MAS 962

Scaling up ClearBoard: the Clear Room

Before I begin to describe the concept, I should note that it comes
from three sources: ClearBoard, wearable computing (thanks to Thad for
bringing this to my attention), and an attempt to be realistic rather
than completely science fictional.  There's no reason to call it Clear
Room except that it happens in a room and I was thinking about
ClearBoard.

The idea of Clear Room is to give people who are widely geographically
distributed a chance to collaborate at a virtual whiteboard.  In this
respect, it is like clearboard, however, it goes beyond clearboard in
that it would like to allow more than two people to collaborate.

A session of clear room uses the meeting with white board as its
model.  People share a space with chairs and a table, and may take
turns moving to the whiteboard and drawing there, or may put as many
people at the white board as can fit (or more).  Each person can both
hear what other people are saying and notice what they are paying
attention to through gestural cues.

The setup of clear room is as follows.  Each site must have a room
with a digital whiteboard of the same size and shape.  The room
layouts, ideally, would be similar, but this may or may not be
strictly necessary.  Each participant would wear a pair of glasses,
ideally as light as possible, allowing a computer to project an image
over what they would normally see, and stereo headphones.  Also, there
would be cameras in each room allowing a computer to keep track of the
person using that location.  (The cameras could be replaced by any
method that allows a computer to keep track of a personUs gestures and
gaze.)  The device providing the person's overlay image would also
have to have some feedback to tell the computer controlling clear room
where the wearer is looking so that the appropriate picture could be
projected.

In the virtual meeting, the other people are projected into each
participantUs vision, so that they can be seen.  While it would be
desirable for them to be photorealistic, this is obviously beyond us
at this time, and for a first cut people could be represented as more
simple models, as long as gestures and gaze were accurately
reproduced.  In addition, what is written on one whiteboard would be
displayed on all of them.  This could be done either through
projecting it as the people are projected, or by having the boards
themselves communicate.  Either way would work.  In any case, this
would also allow the contents of the whiteboard to be saved after the
meeting, or for more complicated things to be displayed on it through
computer control, such as video.

A number of points should be addressed as far as human interaction.
Furniture in the rooms should be laid out in a similar fashion.  This
would avoid the somewhat distracting sight of colleagues walking
through your table.  Additionally, while there is nothing in the
system preventing two people from occupying the same space, I think
that users would not wish to, as this would only be confusing (and
probably rude).  Speech should be reproduced in stereo: for instance,
someone speaking to your left should be heard mostly in your left ear.
In all cases attempts should be made to preserve the illusion that the
projected people are in fact real people in the meeting room with you.

The necessary components for Clear Room are, I believe, within reach
of present technology.  Having computers keep track of peopleUs
gestures is already being researched.  The technology for overlaying
images onto real space also exists, and the technology for placing
those images within a room is being researched as well.  The rest is
trivial: the digital whiteboarding and stereo sound already exist in
todayUs applications and games.

While this falls short of the full virtual reality envisioned by many,
I think that by limiting the space and objects that the computer must
know about to one room and a whiteboard a limited but useful virtual
space is possible now.  The virtual space has to map to a physical
space in this manner so that moving around and interacting with others
in it will feel natural.  While flying through virual space with a
mouse and goggles might have some applications in the entertainment
industry, I do not believe that it will ever be useful as a tool for
getting work done.

The full virtual office will have to wait until the computer can write
images directly into our brains, which isn't even the forseeable
future.  Clear Room is implementable today, and could prove to be of
use for distributed collaborative work.