This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. The object of this research effort is to exploit a wholly new interactive window concept, already experimentally implemented in the laboratory, as a basis for construction of flexible new forms of collaboration environments. These environments will allow collaborators to work within a shared information space whose structure adjusts easily to and whose visual form naturally expresses the inherent structure of their collaboration. The first stage of this research is to define and implement a basic collection of functions in an interactive zoomable window system. This system will then be extended across a network, thereby making available a shared information space which will allow an arbitrary number of users to work in a common virtual environment, each possibly enjoying a different view of this environment. Then a series of experiments to test the real benefit to collaborators will be conducted.
