Televiewpointer
Agustina Sun, Chengzheng Sun · 2010
Various workspace awareness widgets and supporting techniques have been developed for collaborative 2D systems, but little has been done in supporting these widgets in collaborative 3D systems. In this paper, we contribute a novel awareness widget - televiewpointer, which provides integrated and flexible televiewing and telepointing capabilities in real-time collaborative 3D design systems that allow relaxed WYSIWIS and concurrent work. Distinctive features of the televiewpointer include: (1) extension of telepointers from 2D to 3D representation with a distant telepointing capability; (2) integration with view frustums to represent users' view scope and workspace contextual information for telepointing; (3) incorporation of mirror views to provide complementary views to the shared 3D workspace and a distributed radar view; and (4) combination with 2D telepointers to provide a flexible telepointing service in multiple working/viewing spaces without requiring users to synchronize their working perspectives. Supporting televiewpointers in real-time collaborative 3D designs systems is challenging because the free and concurrent work and televiewpoint raises a potential problem of inconsistent and incorrect workspace awareness information. This paper discusses the design rationales behind the proposed televiewpointer features, presents technical solutions in supporting these features and maintaining their consistencies, and formulates usability hypotheses in relation to these features for future evaluation. All features and techniques reported in this paper have been implemented in the CoMaya collaborative 3D design system. The demonstration video of the televiewpointer is available at http://cooffice.ntu.edu.sg/comaya/videoTVP.php.