An image is a lonely place

Tom Morgan tmorgan at acm.org
Fri Oct 1 01:01:13 UTC 1999


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 
-- 
+---Tom Morgan ------------------------------ (tmorgan at acm.org) -----+
I   KeySpan Energy                          Phone: 1 718 403 2427    I
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