Interaction in Cooperative and Hybrid Work Environments

Dr Christian Mller-Tomfelde
Intelligent Interactive Technology Group
CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences
North Ryde

Tuesday 10th June 2003 at 11am

Abstract

In this talk, the author will introduce research and development for the support of interaction and cooperation in hybrid work environments as demonstrated by the project called i-LAND.
Ongoing development in the area of information technology has enabled the realization of new forms of interaction that support the intuitive interaction with electronic documents beyond the desktops as well as the support of collaboration in team work situations with computers. Especially, for meeting rooms in office work environments the concept of so-called roomware components is proposed. Roomware integrates the real and the virtual parts into room element and forms a homogeneous work environment for team meeting, presentation and learning environments. In contrast to concepts like augmented reality or ubiquitous computing, the characteristics of the real and virtual worlds are integrated in hybrid environments to create new affordances to support the interaction and collaboration. The i-LAND project, in which the author was involved from its beginning in 1997, also represents a successful research and development project in cooperation with German industry in which the mutual fertilization made it possible to refine some of the research prototypes into products.

 

Short resume

Christian Mller-Tomfelde received his Diplomingenieur degree from the University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany. Afterwards he worked at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe on a project of the Media Museum of the ZKM concerning interactive and virtual room acoustics. Since 1997 he worked then as a researcher at GMD-IPSI's division AMBIENTE "Workspaces of the Future" in Darmstadt/Germany (now Fraunhofer-IPSI). At IPSI he was involved in the i-LAND project and in the design of the roomware components of the first and second generation. In his dissertation he explored new forms of audio feedback for the collaborative interaction in a hybrid, next generation work environment. In April 2003 Christian joined the Intelligent Interactive Technology team of CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences. He is active in the fields of human-computer interaction, multimodal interfaces, auditory display, computer-supported cooperative work and the disappearing computer.