Spatial hypermedia

Overview of systems

• Classical link-less hypermedia Aquanet

  • http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/hdi/papers/marshall91-aquanet.pdf

• Classical spatial hypermedia VIKI

  • http://bush.cs.tamu.edu/~shipman/ht97-final.pdf

• WebSquirrel

  • http://www.eastgate.com/squirrel/Welcome.html

• Hotsauce

  • http://www.xspace.net/hotsauce/

• Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB)

  • http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/VKB/

• CAOS

  • http://www.daimi.au.dk/~oreinert/msc_thesis/thesis_html/

• Manufaktur

  • http://www.daimi.au.dk/manufaktur/index.shtml

  • http://as15.iguw.tuwien.ac.at/desarte/hypermedia.pdf

• Topos

  • http://www.daimi.au.dk/workspace

Spatial organisation of material

• Diversity of materials

• Maintain relationships

• Location location location!

• Physical information retrieval

Information triage

Spatial hypermedia

• Representational rather than navigational

• Creating rather than reading

• Visual structure

• Authoring constraints

Aquanet - collaborative knowledge structuring

Aquanet - spatial discussion

VIKI - interface and relationships

Visual Knowledge Builder - concept and idea

• What is VKB for?

  • to organize, and interpret information from a variety of sources. Examples of uses include:

  • writing a related work section of a thesis, dissertation, paper, etc.

  • making decisions that involve grouping or categorizing items

  • scheduling or organizing tasks.

Visual Knowledge Builder

• What to do...

  • start by dragging and dropping items from the desktop, web pages, and images into your personal or group information space.

  • then move the visual symbols into clusters, lists, or other structures.

  • categorize symbols by changing visual attributes like color, border color, border width, font, etc.

  • as your information space enlarges, put symbols into a hierarchy of collections.

Visual Knowledge Builder

Visual Knowledge Builder

Automated support - examples

• Spatial parser

  • automatic detection of collections, lists, tables etc.

• Generation of folder hierarchies

  • e.g. Bookmark sorting

• Generation of Guided Tours

  • e.g Walden Paths from VIKI

  • e.g. sequencing references in a specific collection

WebSquirrel - www.eastgate.com

HotSauce - Apple Project X

TaskGallery - Microsoft Research

CAOS - Master's Thesis, AU

Why 3D?

• 2D desktop insufficient to mimic physical organization of material

• 3D provides a better overview of materials

Clusters and arrangements

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE)

• Seamless establishment of AV conferences in virtual rooms

• Proximity and location is used to form conferences

• Support for presence of many users (as avatars)

• Examples: MASSIVE and DIVE

MARS - Columbia University

Manufaktur - 3D Spatial hypermedia and Document Centered CVE

• General infrastructure for document-centered CVE

• Management of Workspaces,- collections of material belonging to, e.g. a task or project contexts

• "Live" hypermedia-links to real documents

• Distributed and collaborative architecture

• Multi platform support (DirectX and OpenGL)

• No human-like avatars - hand and camera only

Explicit and implicit grouping - spatial hypermedia structuring

• Groups may be created manually

  • add to group

  • remove from group

• Groups may be identified semi-automatically based on intersecting auras

  • invoking 3D spatial parsing on demand

  • as future work, we consider background incremental parsing

• Groups can be stored and handled as hypermedia composite objects

Ongoing research

• Next generation Manufaktur = Topos as a "roomware" component

  • projection devices: Smartboard, HoloBench and tables

  • two-handed input, gesture interface, speech recognition

• Understanding workspaces and work practice

  • metaphors for workspaces

  • space topology and furnishing

• Representing hypermedia structures in 3D

  • visualization of structures, natural integration in the common workspace

• Geo-Spatial services

  • GPS-based placement and navigation of WorkSpaces

• Collaboration support

  • tightly and loosely coupled collaboration

  • common view and orientation

Topos - large scale interaction

• Pen interaction - gestures

• Multiple users taking turns

• Remote collaboration

Mapping information to real locations - examples

Vision of mobile support for architects working in the field

Geo-spatial hypermedia - managing material in the field

• Location based service

  • know where you are (GPS)

  • take photos in context

  • collecting and tagging items

• Sketching and scribbling

  • creativity on site

  • taking notes about the site

• Collaboration

  • communicate with the home office and others on site

3D geo-spatial hypermedia - tracking a user in model space

• Camera represents user's GPS location

• User "bumps into" documents

• Documents are created relative to camera position/direction

3D geo-spatial hypermedia - first prototype

3D geo-spatial hypermedia - second prototype

GPS integration in Topos

• GPS consists of satellites in low earth orbit sending time-coded signals to the ground.

• Compute location and height above sea level to within 10 meters precision

• Differential GPS gives sub-meter precision

• Topos receives GPS over a serial link using the NMEA-0183 protocol

  • retrieves latitude, longitude and altitude data

  • plus compass direction

Direct versus indirect navigation

• Topos supports both direct physical navigation and indirect representational navigation.

• Direct physical navigation

• physical walking or driving is a typical means of navigation in geo-spatial hypermedia

• Indirect representational navigation

• pointing and searching information on locations physically remote from the user's location is also possible in geo-spatial hypermedia