The Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project

Abstract

The Stanford Interactive Workspaces project developed a set of technologiesfor integrating multiple devices in a co-located workspace, basedon a few basic principles: 1. The interactions should maximize thepotential for ``fluency'' of the users, reducing as much as possiblethe need to shift attention from the content of the work to the mechanism.2. The integration should focus on commodity devices running existingoperating systems and applications, so the workspace is not an isolatedisland. It should provide an ``overface'' that brings them together,rather than replacing the existing widely used interfaces. 3. Thesystem should be loosely coupled and robust, so that failures andchanges of individual elements are gracefully handled and do notdisrupt the functioning of the overall workspace. The project developeda middleware layer named iROS, based on these principles, which employeda mechanism called the Event Heap to provide robustness and dynamicloose coupling between the components. Other developments includedPostBrainstorm, a large high-resolution pen-based display to facilitategroup activities such as brainstorming, and a number of other toolsthat extended the iRoom capacities to new devices and interactionmodes.