Collaboration Across Time, Space, and Reality

This is one of the finalists for the ISMAR 2023 Design competition with the theme, “Cross-Reality Systems for Real-World Scenarios“. We proposed a solution for performing literature review tasks in an immersive space with time-distributed and space-distributed collaborators. So our solution included both synchronous and asynchronous awareness.

Here’s the abstract from our submission.

Collaboration plays a vital role in both academia and industry whenever we need to browse through a big amount of data to extract meaningful insights. These collaborations often involve people living far from each other, with different levels of access to technology. Effective cross-border collaborations require reliable telepresence systems that provide support for communication, cooperation, and understanding of contextual cues. In the context of collaborative academic writing, while immersive technologies offer novel ways to enhance collaboration and enable efficient information exchange in a shared workspace, traditional devices such as laptops still offer better readability for longer articles. We propose the design of a hybrid cross-reality cross-device networked system that allows the users to harness the advantages of both worlds. Our system allows users to import documents from their personal computers (PC) to an immersive headset, facilitating document sharing and simultaneous collaboration with both colocated colleagues and remote colleagues. Our system also enables a user to seamlessly transition between Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and the traditional PC environment, all within a shared workspace. We present the real-world scenario of a global academic team conducting a comprehensive literature review, demonstrating its potential for enhancing cross-reality hybrid collaboration and productivity.

Here’s our prototype.

@inproceedings{tahmid2023colt,

title = {CoLT: Enhancing Collaborative Literature Review Tasks with Synchronous and Asynchronous Awareness Across the Reality-Virtuality Continuum},

author = {Ibrahim A Tahmid and Francielly Rodrigues and Alexander Giovannelli and Lee Lisle and Jerald Thomas and Doug A Bowman},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

urldate = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)},

pages = {831–836},

organization = {IEEE},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}