TeamSpace has been a fixture in Meyer Library's first floor lobby for nearly a year, creating a unique, publicly accessible, collaborative workspace environment for the Stanford community, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week:
http://teamspace.stanford.edu/
How Did It Begin?
The concept for TeamSpace developed out of Computer Science Department research regarding the challenges involved with human-computer and software interactions in computer-supported collaboration environments utilizing large screens displays. The five-year effort, funded by a grant from the Wallenberg Global Learning Network, resulted in many software design and usage model innovations. This research also led to prototypes in Wallenberg Hall classrooms, where faculty and students quickly integrated the collaboration capabilities of the software into course instruction and classroom use.
The premise for TeamSpace was to extract key components from this work and deploy them for unsupervised use. Therefore, project objectives centered on affordability, ease of replication, intuitive user interface and automatic error recovery. Teamspace inherits two features from the original research, namely PointRight and Multibrowse for shared pointing device control and file sharing, respectively.
PointRight allows a pointing device on any computer to serve as a pointer on any other screen. In the context of Teamspace, PointRight is used to control the public display from any connected laptop computer. Multibrowse enables any file or URL from one computer to be actively "pushed" onto the display. Thus, you can move a file to the large display, to your partner(s) display or all at the same time.
Installation in Meyer and User Studies
After the classroom pilot, the next logical step was to extend this collaboration environment to a public facility. Meyer Library was chosen for its accessibility and location.
To determine how these groups interacted with each other and the software environment, a first round of user studies was conducted during the initial phase of the TeamSpace installation with paid volunteers separated into two types: 1) arbitrarily formed groups and pre-existing groups, i.e., those who had a project from class or student organizations.
Differences were noted in how group members worked together in the environment as well as interacted with the software and displays. The studies discovered additional user needs that may be added to future open source releases. Information regarding the user study finding can be found through the TeamSpace web site.
What's Next?
With the completion of the user studies, the future of TeamSpace involves a migration from the open source product to a commercial version of the collaborative application. Tidebreak has developed a commercial-grade version based on the open source software prototyped in the TeamSpace project. Tidebreak products include PointRight, for display control, FileWarp, to move files and url's to user or public displays, and CrossPaste, that allows cut/paste functionality across displays. These and additional potential software augmentations will be available in the TeamSpace environment in the near future.
More Information
TeamSpace has been a very attractive addition to the Meyer computer environment as students seek collaboration environments other than just looking over one another's laptop. (See also the Technology-Enhanced Learning Space in Meyer Library in the September 2004 issue of this newsletter.)
The TeamSpace project was greatly assisted by members of the Stanford University Computer Science Department including Terry Winograd, Armando Fox, Clara C. Shih, and Andy Szybalski, as well as staff within Academic Computing.
For more information about the project, see the TeamSpace web site. You can also contact TeamSpace at teamspace@stanford.edu.
