Exploring Handheld, Agent-based, Multimodal Collaboration

Designing software for handheld computers is challenging because of their limited computing power, memory, display size, and the choices of hardware and operating systems. In addition to these challenges, collaborative handheld applications must deal with distributed computing and other network-related issues. We believe that by designing these applications as multimodal, multiagent systems, we can address some of these challenges. Taking this position, we have designed QuickSet, a multimodal application for group work on electronic maps. By leveraging QuickSet’s agent-based roots, we were able to quickly add collaboration capabilities to it. In this paper, we will discuss QuickSet’s collaboration capabilities, the ease with which they were added to the user interface, and plans for future extensions to these capabilities.