I've been noticing how lonesome it is inside an image.
There are lots of strong place based/community elements which surround Squeak. These are currently formed by the basic networked apps of email, the discussion Swiki, the mail archives, and so on.
There is now lots of machinery which is available which would allow basic collaborative support right inside a running image (and there are some spacey ones imagineable using the 3D stuff that feel like 'Snowcrash')
The kinds of things that I have in mind revolve around establishing a sense of 'place', which is shared, 'embodiment' of you the user explicitly some how in the interface and some amount of 'awareness' of the presence of others in the shared place, all done with a light enough touch that we don't end up with avatar fashion shows.
In this picture, an Morphic book wouldn't be found by reaching out across the network and loading it; instead, there'd be a more or less far away part of your image (maybe dressed up as an Alice world) that would let you wander around and find the book you wanted. Perahaps the author would hand it to you, if he happened to be around.
While working, instead of the discussion Swiki, there'd be small knots of others, gathered around places of interest to them. You could glance around and see if anyone was nearby, possibly interested in what you were up to.
Over the course of a few years, I have seen naive users comfortably navigate incredibly complex graph structures, when they are presented with a place based metaphor.
I am not sure how universally appealing these interface metaphors are, but they seem to be captivating for at least some portion of the population.
I remember one posting about trying to incorporate the ICQ protocols into Squeak.
Are there others padding around this collaborative territory?
...Tom M
Tom --
Funny you should bring this up ....
Cheers,
Alan
------
At 3:58 AM -0800 9/29/99, Tom Morgan wrote:
I've been noticing how lonesome it is inside an image.
There are lots of strong place based/community elements which surround Squeak. These are currently formed by the basic networked apps of email, the discussion Swiki, the mail archives, and so on.
There is now lots of machinery which is available which would allow basic collaborative support right inside a running image (and there are some spacey ones imagineable using the 3D stuff that feel like 'Snowcrash')
The kinds of things that I have in mind revolve around establishing a sense of 'place', which is shared, 'embodiment' of you the user explicitly some how in the interface and some amount of 'awareness' of the presence of others in the shared place, all done with a light enough touch that we don't end up with avatar fashion shows.
In this picture, an Morphic book wouldn't be found by reaching out across the network and loading it; instead, there'd be a more or less far away part of your image (maybe dressed up as an Alice world) that would let you wander around and find the book you wanted. Perahaps the author would hand it to you, if he happened to be around.
While working, instead of the discussion Swiki, there'd be small knots of others, gathered around places of interest to them. You could glance around and see if anyone was nearby, possibly interested in what you were up to.
Over the course of a few years, I have seen naive users comfortably navigate incredibly complex graph structures, when they are presented with a place based metaphor.
I am not sure how universally appealing these interface metaphors are, but they seem to be captivating for at least some portion of the population.
I remember one posting about trying to incorporate the ICQ protocols into Squeak.
Are there others padding around this collaborative territory?
...Tom M
I'm hoping AOL eventually resolves their "Microsoft chat vs AOL lawyers" business so my Instant Messenger protocol will work too... the image is no longer a lonely place for me! ...and once I finish it, it won't be a lonely place for you either...
Dino
At 7:58 AM -0400 9/29/99, Tom Morgan wrote:
I've been noticing how lonesome it is inside an image.
There are lots of strong place based/community elements which surround Squeak. These are currently formed by the basic networked apps of email, the discussion Swiki, the mail archives, and so on.
....
Are there others padding around this collaborative territory?
Joining in the chorus of people working on this: Creating a "collaborative dynabook" is the focus of the Georgia Tech Squeakers.
- We already have Lex Spoon's MuSwiki which allows for Swiki-like sharing of any Morph (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/projects/squeakers/10.html).
- As you mentioned, Dino (Dean Mao) has been working on ICsQueak, and is trying to move that into realtime chat with generic objects.
- Bolot Kerimbaev and Je77 Rick are working on Comanche (a new webserver to replace PWS that will provide a framework for doing other kinds of networked apps, like Linda) and Comanche Swiki (which we're already testing in several classes with tremendous results). Je77 (pronounced "Jeff") has a goal of creating an audio Swiki.
- I've been pestering Jeff and Andreas with questions because we are interested (down the road) in using Wonderland to create scriptable, sharable 3-D worlds.
Mark
-------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
I summarized the description of projects working on features for collaboration within Squeak into a page on the Swiki:
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.902
The page is reachable from the 'Projects' page.
A couple of comments on the discussion that also surfaced.
I agree wholeheartedly with Chris Norton about 'VR'. We have an 'RR' (real reality) that's just fine with me. What we do with our networked computers ought to be an adjunct, not an alternate or virtualization of all the rest of our world.
I do think that there are quite a few elements of how people actually collaborate in 'RR' with each other that can help computer mediated interactions.
These elements can be very subtle things, hard to see, since we just do them all the time.
To get an idea of how subtle some of these elements are, you can make a small experiment with colleagues (or ever suffering students). Have a small group of people re-arrange the furniture in a conference room -- or just have them walk into a conference room where the furniture is in disarray and watch and listen very, very closely to what actually happens. It is surprising how little explicit, coherent speech/orders/planning occur. Mostly there will be pointing, funny facial expressions, grunts, nudges, glances to see where others are looking or moving or pushing, and the furniture somehow gets arranged.
It's the in image, networked *analogues* of those elements of furniture moving collaboration that fascinate me.
...Tom M
To get an idea of how subtle some of these elements are, you can make a small experiment with colleagues (or ever suffering students). Have a small group of people re-arrange the furniture in a conference room -- or just have them walk into a conference room where the furniture is in disarray and watch and listen very, very closely to what actually happens. It is surprising how little explicit, coherent speech/orders/planning occur. Mostly there will be pointing, funny facial expressions, grunts, nudges, glances to see where others are looking or moving or pushing, and the furniture somehow gets arranged.
This is *SO* true. You should see our GA Tech Squeakers lab. Definitly not arranged in the best of ways. We couldn't even decide how to re-arange it either. I guess thats what you get for leaving things up to a bunch of grad and undergrad students. :-)
Point very well taken.
-------------------- Jen a.k.a. Smilie :-P smilie@cc.gatech.edu
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