Just last night I worked on a computer simulation of the deformation of a solid body using ANSYS. My group contained three people, and we all worked on the simulation together, sort of.
The first, and most obivous problem, is that there was only one mouse. This led to some interface and coordinate issues discussed in the Cao paper. According to Cao, most commands were verbal, and included pointing in order to communicate information to other players. This make work in a multi-mouse system, but what I found was that verbal cues were insufficient for this complex of a task, and very often users pointed to things on the screen, touched the screen directly, or grabbed the mouse in order to take control.
One advantage of the single user display was that the other two users could interact with the physical world while one user was using the computer. Very often, one of us would be doing hand calculations while the other planned the next step, and the third worked on the computer. This enabled us to work more efficiently by being able to take advantage of physical media simultaenously with virtual media, an idea discussed in the Scott paper.
The final issue was the display angle. Although the monitor was large, one user was clearly out of it's vision range. This meant that the user was left out of the more intricate tasks, and did not always work on the project. Having some sort of spherical or holodisplay would remedy this.
As long as users can multi-task by doing things that are not on the Single Display, the SD works quite well. Any intricate work, or work where only the computer is used, a Single Display leads to problems, at least in my limited experience.
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It sounds like it would be great to have a single projected screen that mirrors a shared desktop. This coupled with the use of a collaboration technology like Adobe Connect that will allow users to share and work together. The use of a touch screen to simulate the intuitive notion of pointing at a screen, leaving the mouse free to be used to grab objects. Adobe Connect could be the median to indirectly have multiple interfaces.
ReplyDeleteUsing a single screen can always be troublesome. You were right with the fact that if there is a lot of multi-tasking to be done on the side, then a single display won't be much of a problem. However, this becomes a huge issue if most of the tasks has to be done on the computer (it isn't just in your limited experience, at this point, I believe it is a fact.) The projection screen is a good idea. It works well when a large group has to see something on the screen, but still doesn't solve the multiple users trying to work on the same screen/project at the same time. Nice post.
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