Development of middleware GLIA for connective wide collaborative space with networked I/O device

Abstract

Middleware named GLIA has been developed to realize wide collaborative space with combining many desktop computers and shared work over all desktop space with a networked mouse. The middleware has been implemented with Java/Swing API and a networked mouse has been realized with mobile objects both to require no server and to guarantee scalability. The GLIA was applied to experiments to evaluate the networked mouse performance by the task that a user clicks at a target image, which was randomly appeared on the wide workspace. The results showed as follows; the mouse performance of GLIA was not inferior to an usual single mouse and supported collaboration environment of three persons with wide screens. The performance of UDP/IP implementation using GLIA was superior to both TCP/IP and Bluetooth implementation. GLIA seems to be effective for the space of idea generation method which need wide space of screen. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.