This project, developing a flexible department-wide collaborative work infrastructure, "Pervasive Pixels," that will serve as a testbed for research in collaborative systems, aims to use this collaborative framework to conduct research and teaching. Pervasive Pixels will capture and deliver multimedia information across heterogeneous networks and devices. The system will schedule meetings, manage and prefetch multimedia objects, laying out material on individual and shared displays. Meetings are facilitated by locating, tracking and identifying users as they desire and are recorded, annotated and summarized, with extensive research capabilities. While improvements in core computation and communication technologies encourage working and interacting remotely, engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations that span buildings, cities, and countries, routinely encounters severe limitations imposed by current collaboration support systems. Pervasive Pixels is created to address these problems and should make possible Capturing and delivering multimedia information (including video), through heterogeneous networks, clients, and devices; Scheduling meetings, managing and prefetching work documents and multimedia objects, and laying out materials of individual and shared displays, based on models of workflow needs and models of temporal, spatial, and semantic interrelationships; Facilitating meetings by locating, tracking, and identifying users, and understanding their gestures, in live and captured video and audio; Recording, annotating, summarizing, and searching meeting content, from multiple physical perspectives and via multiple types of database queries, thus maximizing the effects of temporal differences. The infrastructure emphasizes Large, instrumented, multi-display workspaces in a variety of locations, to accommodate group interactions. Networked mobile devices of various capacities, used individually and in the context of larger workspaces. Transparent and automatic adaptability to changes of place, platform, or group composition, allowing mobile users to interact as they move about, without having to account for these changes manually. Support a wide range of hardware and software, beginning with commercial off-the-shelf commodity components, whose capabilities are retained while the system evolves, ultimately leading to new standards for meeting environments.
