The i3-project Magic
Lounge aims at the development of intelligent communication
services for virtual meeting spaces supporting the needs of a
broad user population. The typical Magic
Lounge users are ordinary people with little knowledge on the
underlying telecommunication technology. The motivations for entering
the Magic Lounge are as diverse as the interests of the potential
user?s themselves. Some may join just to chat or to make new
acquaintances. Others may engage in exchanging and sharing ideas,
experience and knowledge on matters which relate to their professions,
or hobby-related activities, as when stamp collectors, opera lovers or
mountain climbers meet to indulge in their joint interest. Yet others
may share common cultural or political interests and even use virtual
meeting spaces as arenas of civil discourse. Magic Lounge aims at a
close involvement of real communities from specification and design
through to system evaluation. Such a real community, for instance,
consists of the inhabitants of the smaller Danish isles who are
represented in the project by the Bank of Ideas of the Smaller Danish
Isles. However, there are numerous of further potential user
communities including boarding schools, clubs and associations, and
last but not least the geographically dispersed team of the Magic
Lounge developers.
A user-centred design
Design and development of the Magic Lounge is
based on user-centred design methodology. A selected group of users
from a number of smaller Danish islands have been involved with the
various aspects of the Magic Lounge design and development. The user
participation has been through administering questionnaires,
conducting workshops, interviews, and the use of the software
prototypes. Besides this main Danish user group, other groups have
also been utilised for testing specific aspects of the Magic Lounge
software, or collecting users ideas for the design of specific system
components.
Virtual meeting spaces that can remember
Study of the current
teleconferencing and groupware systems, as well as our own
participatory design work with ordinary users have revealed a strong
need for a structured memory. Our hypothesis is that a variety of
added-value communication services can emerge from a system’s
capability to memorise information units that have been obtained from
observing how people communicate and interact which each other in a
virtual meeting space. While most of today’s collaborative systems
consist of a set of loosely coupled communication tools (audio/video
conferencing tools, textual chat, shared white boards, and shared
special-purpose tools, e.g. for voting or collaborative web-browsing)
we suggest an architecture that is centered around the concept of a
conversation memory that will keep track of all communication acts
regardless of the media-specific tools that are used for
communication, and that can be queried by newcomers or latecomers who
want to know what has happened in a meeting so far. The conception of
the Magic Lounge memory component foresees the recording of spoken and
typed utterances as well as other interaction events, such as the
mutual exchange of references to electronic documents, which may be
part of the virtual meeting environment. The conception also comprises
a set of different user interfaces for accessing the memory content
from specific points of view and by means of different communication
devices. In particular, a 'temporal meeting browser' allows users to
navigate back and forth through recorded meetings and inspect
individual contributions in a non-linear manner. Hence, a Magic Lounge
recorded meeting is a structured collection of different types of
contribution (such as audio chat, speech turn, textual chat, and log
information) which should allow the user to mentally reconstruct the
whole meeting including its meaning, dynamics and progress. A
contribution to a meeting can indeed be any action by the users or the
system itself.
Beyond the mere exchange of messages and data
An important insight was that a structured communication framework
would be needed for the realization of many of the envisaged memory
and communication support functions. The consortium adopted a
framework that is based on the notion of referable objects (in the
sense of objects to which one can refer to), communicative-acts and
conversations. Essentially, communicative acts denote activities, such
as exchanging audio or chat messages among the communication partners.
By treating the communication acts as referable objects, it is
possible to reconstruct the flow of activity between all the clients
(humans and system components) at a higher level of abstraction, and
to reveal the various relations that may exist between the single
acts.
Getting the mobile users in
An important project goal is to enable access to a virtual meeting space through
mobile devices to account for the rapidly growing community of mobile but nevertheless
connected users. The increasing quest for mobility together
with a large variety of new portable computing and communication
devices - including PDA's, palmtop, and mobile phones with build-in
micro computers - add another level of complexity to systems which are
to support tele-communication and collaborative work. This is due to
the fact that the devices used by different people may not have the
same input and output capabilities. Limited screen real estate, lack
of high resolution and colors, no support for audio and video are
among the typical restrictions on the output site, whereas
restrictions on the input site may be due to miniaturized keyboards
and GUI widgets, tiny physical control elements, or sparse
capabilities for the capture and recognition of gesture, voice and
video input. The new generation of mobiles with built-in Internet
connection will create a high demand for a technology that allows to
enter virtual meeting spaces and to access existing information
sources and applications in a user-friendly way.
The Magic Lounge
platform for hosting virtual meetings allows entering a meeting using
heterogeneous communication devices, such as PCs and
mobile phones.
Mobile access to the meeting space is partly based on WAP, (Wireless Application Protocol) which employs WML
(Wireless Markup Language), and partly on a wireless telephone connection.
We use an automated presentation planner
to allow for flexible tailoring of both content and layout of WML pages in a way that suits the display restrictions of the target devices.
Preliminary user studies indicate that using a mobile phone to access the Magic Lounge virtual
meeting space is well appreciated by the users and is a relatively easy task to perform - though
several procedures, such as writing a text message, are yet laborious, and some confusion may arise
because of unchangeable device-specific assignments of functions to keys. However, there is hope that interaction
design can be significantly improved by switching to forthcoming WAP versions.
An architecture based on standards
Many of the current
collaborative systems use proprietary solutions for their architecture
which make modifications or extensions difficult. In Magic Lounge, we
have decided that, when it was possible and available, our
architecture would be based on standards. In this way, the
communication infrastructure is based on CORBA (Common Object Request
Broker Architecture) from the OMG (Object Management Group ). As
objects are the basic building blocks of the system, the structured
memory uses an object-oriented database which is conform to the
standards supported by the ODMG (Object Data Management Group) for API
and request language (OQL - Object Query Language).
Thomas Rist
Last modified: Dec. 2000