Caretta: A System for Supporting Face-to-face Collaboration by Integrating Personal and Shared Spaces

OVERVIEW
A system called Caretta that integrates personal and shared spaces to support face-to-face collaboration has been developed. We use PDAs and a multiple-input sensing board for personal and shared spaces, respectively. Users of Caretta can discuss and negotiate with each other in the shared space by manipulating physical objects, while they individually examine their ideas in their own personal spaces. Caretta allows users to participate in group activities interchangeably and seamlessly using both these spaces. Caretta is applicable to various collaborative tasks. In this paper, it supports users in urban planning tasks. User studies of Caretta demonstrated that it allowed users to collaborate in a flexible fashion: users could work individually in their personal spaces at their own pace, cooperatively work together in the shared space, and smoothly transition between both of the spaces.

Fig 1. An overview of Carreta

Fig 2. The shared space of Caretta augmented with graphics overlay from a projector (left) and the Sensingboard that identifies an object with an RFID tag (right)

Fig 3. Supporting smooth transition between each user's personal space (PDA) and the shared space for co-located people

PUBLICATION (selected)

• Sugimoto, M., Hosoi,K., Hashizume, H.: Caretta: A System for Supporting Face-to-Face Collaboration by Integrating Personal and Shared Spaces, In Proceedings of ACM CHI2004, Vienna, Austria, pp.41-48 (2004) (PDF in ACM Digital Library).
• 細井, 杉本, 橋爪:Caretta: 個人空間と共有空間を統合した協調作業支援システム, 人工知能学会論文誌Vol.19. No.2, pp.136-144 (2004).