The latest MAS890 news: While the old server is being upgraded, the course web site is now at: http://www.media.mit.edu/~stefan/mas890. I've added our bios to the web site and also refined the wording for Assignment #1 and #2. I also added a web link to a fairly complete draft version of Weiser's "The computer for the 21st century" which is at: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html It's really a must-read for any media lab researcher. * * * Before Monday, please be sure to send your "letter" about each of the people you met to each of those people. Assignment #2, for next week, is as follows: Obtain and read the letters sent to you from the people you met. Collect your own notes as well, and write a few paragraphs on the experience. Focus on and compare the technologies and the interfaces involved in each interaction. What did the other person get right about you and what did they get wrong? Why? Expound upon 1-2 key points that came out of the experience for you. Submit these before class next week. Electronic submissions are preferred. Plain text or HTML are best. Feel free to embed/attach any other media, such as photos, in these submissions. * * * On our last meeting -- I'm sure nobody was more frustrated with the state of the technology than I was. I found it very weird and awkward to present the material that I had with all the various problems, and it was next to impossible to hold a cross-site discussion due to the muffled quality of the audio at both ends. On the positive side, all of these problems suggest some clear and easy solutions that we will be working on for next week's meeting. Any suggestions are welcome ! I'd like to briefly recap some of the main points I was trying to make in yesterday's meeting. I include below the same material from my slides, slightly augmented. Mike may wish to add to these, and I also invite you to send me any quick comments, if you have questions or find holes, and I will collect these and send them to the list in advance of next week's discussion. * * * Our last meeting was about "Media Spaces" -- one important starting point in understanding the historical context of some of the ideas we want to examine in this course. The term originated from R. Stults at Xerox PARC in 1986. His definition was: "An electronic setting in which groups of people can work together, even when they are not resident in the same place or present at the same time. In a media space, people can create real-time visual and acoustic environments that span physically separate areas. They can also control the recording, accessing and replaying of images and sounds from those environments." The work on media spaces there and at other institutions is based on the belief that "work is fundamentally social" in that "it is constructed out of the activities of the participants and those activities depend on more than the explicit content of the work task" [see the Bly et. al. "Media Spaces" reading]. This seems especially true in "work" or other types of activities that involve any amount of creativity, in which interpersonal relationships, informal encounters, and social interaction are so much a part of keeping that creativity "buzzing". Several have attempted to put some structure on the concerns involved in supporting "work" at a distance. Moran & Anderson (Proc CSCW 1990) identify 3 approaches: 1. Shared Workspaces 2. Coordinated Communication 3. Informal Interaction Media spaces arguably fit in the "informal interaction" approach. William Buxton (see the Buxton reading) distinguishes between: 1. Task spaces 2. Person spaces He argues for making systems which allow for "smooth and natural transitions" between these two kinds of spaces. These are most certainly not the only ways of structuring the issues, just 2 possible starting points. * * * Origins of Media Spaces: AT&T Picture Phones, demonstrated at the Seattle World's fair in the 1960s, are often referenced as one of the roots of media spaces. An installation by artists Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabinowitz in 1980 called "Hole-in-Space" is also often cited. This was a unique and surprising installation -- there was a live video/audio link between New York and Los Angeles, in public spaces where people would just walk by and could look at and talk to people at the other location on a chance basis. The projections were life-sized. You can read more about these and find references to more info in the Bly et. al "Media Spaces" article. * * * Examples of Media Spaces: * Xerox PARC Media Space -- perhaps we can call it the "original" -- is described in detail in the Bly reading. The system involved miles of video/audio cable wired to various offices and public areas. A central switch controlled which sources were connected to which displays. There was a link between Palo Alto and Portland for a couple of years (up until their Portland lab closed in 1988) which was a unique situation for Xerox to explore awareness and collaboration between distributed research groups. Some of this is documented in the "Office Design Project" video tape that we attempted to view. They often talk about "background awareness" and "continuous office shares" as being some of the most important uses. The Bly article outlines several "uses of media space" that they identified that are worth looking over: awareness, chance encounters, locating colleagues, video phone conversations, group discussions, recording and replaying video records, project support, presentations, social activities. * Telecollaboration (US West) -- Similar to the PARC media space. Connected Denver and Boulder labs. Involved different modes such as "lookaround" or "call". They experimented with remote camera control. * VideoWindow (Bellcore) -- Connected 2 public areas on 2 floors of a building continuously for about 3 months. * Cruiser (Bellcore) -- situated in peoples offices -- consisted of a mode that simulated what it was like to walk (or "cruise") by people's offices, glance in, and see what's going on in each. Incorporated the idea of "reciprocity" -- you would see an image of whoever was "cruising" through your office. * Montage (Sun) -- very much like Cruiser. * RAVE (Rand Xerox EuroPARC) -- a fairly complex system involving connections to every office and commons area on the 3 floors of their lab. Several levels of engagement -- glance, video phone, office-share, background viewing, etc. There were software controls for these as well as for controlling access to your images -- for example, you could give/remove permissions for particular people to "glance" at you. Made very nice use of audio "cues" to indicate the status -- for example you might hear the sound of a door opening and closing during a "glance" operation. * CAVECAT/Telepresence (U of Toronto) -- built on top of the RAVE architecture. * PolyScope/Portholes (Xerox PARC) -- explored passive awareness between PARC and EuroPARC with low res and very low rate video (once every several minutes or several seconds). A desktop app would display a grid of recently captured images from the various sources and animate the last few frames from each. * VIDEOPLACE (Myron Krueger) -- explored extracting person "silhouettes" captured in different places and combining them in a new "videoplace" in which strange things * Teamworkstation/Clearboard (NTT) -- Hiroshi Ishii's work at NTT in building a system for remote shared drawing. Very interesting in the way it incorporates the notion of "gaze awareness". Also very interesting to note the extent to which they documented their design process of iterative refinement over the course of the research, which I think should be a model for us all. * iCom (ML) -- aims to foster awareness and sense of community between different parts of MITML and MLE -- i.e. to make it feel like we're all in one big room. Also being adapted for use in this class, but will hopefully branch to address the specific needs of distributed/synchronous courses. You will find references to virtually all of these projects in the various CHI and CSCW conference proceedings over the past decade. Let me know if you'd like some suggestions. I believe there are, for lack of a better term, many "art" projects and installations dealing with these themes that we don't know about for various reasons, so please send me info on things you've run into, especially those that are documented in some way, that might add depth to this space. Next meeting, I hope we will get a chance to discuss some of the ongoing issues with media spaces -- things like eye contact, conveying facial expression and gestures, number of simultaneous participants, latency, audio quality, camera control, access and privacy, task integration, etc. Some of these are discussed briefly near the end of the Bly reading. I'll post these notes on the web site as soon as possible. s t e f a n