Integrating information appliances into an interactive workspace

The authors present a robust, infrastructure-centric, and platform-independent approach to integrating information appliances into the iRoom, an interactive workspace. The Interactive Workspaces Project at Stanford explores new possibilities for people to work together in technology-rich spaces with computing and interaction devices on many different scales. It includes faculty and students from the areas of graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), networking, ubiquitous computing, and databases, and draws on previous work in all those areas. We design and experiment with multidevice, multiuser environments based on a new architecture that makes it easy to create and add new display and input devices, to move work of all kinds from one computing device to another, and to support and facilitate group interactions. In the same way that today's standard operating systems make it feasible to write single-workstation software that uses multiple devices and networked resources, we are constructing a higher level operating system for the world of ubiquitous computing. We combine research on infrastructure (ways of flexibly configuring and connecting devices, processes, and communication links) with research on HCI (ways of interacting with heterogeneous changing collections of devices with multiple modalities).