A graphical control panel for the shared reality environment
Jin Hua Gu · eScholarship@McGill (McGill) · 2003
Shared Reality Environment, or SRE, is a research project designed to explore novel approaches to human-human interactions using life-size immersive displays. Due to its inter-disciplinary nature, the SRE implementation involves several cooperating daemons running over a heterogeneous network. As the system evolves, coordinating these daemons becomes a challenging task. Our early effort, a text-based controller, remains insufficient because of its command-line interface and lack of daemon launch capability. In order to facilitate easy daemon administration, we have developed a graphical interface known as the SRE control panel, or SRECPan. The SRECPan is designed to assist the user in manipulating the SRE daemons, monitoring their performance, managing the configuration, and visualizing a comprehensive working status from every cooperating daemon. In this thesis, we present our SRECPan design, covering structural decomposition, naming convention, behavioural dynamics, graphical interface, and user configuration. As each design aspect is described with its advantages and limitations, we will refer to relevant alternative solutions investigated during the development process. For some design elements, possible extensions and potential to cope with the ongoing SRE effort are indicated.