Workspace Awareness in Relaxed WYSIWIS Systems

CoMo is a prototype of a collaborative 3D geometric modeling environment designed to support temporally and geographically dispersed work teams. In this environment participants may work in different parts of the space and have distinct perspective viewing of the space. Maintaining workspace awareness, therefore, becomes much more difficult. In this paper we present graphics solutions we adopted for enhancing 3D workspace awareness in CoMo. We reused several individual awareness mechanisms provided by the MTK graphics library designed for single-user applications. An appropriate communication and distribution platform for coordinating individual actions was devised. The main contribution of this paper is to show how group awareness can be implemented by adequately reusing existing individual awareness facilities.

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