Perspective layered visualization of collaborative workspaces

Visual shared workspaces will be always staying on users' screens in the near future. Users will be moving frequently between their personal workspaces for personal and asynchronous work and shared workspaces for communication and synchronous cooperation. Also the system should supports users' everyday awareness of co-workers. For supporting such situation, this paper proposes a new technique to visualize workspaces as a set of layered virtual screens in three-dimensional space. In this way, groups' shared spaces are shown as background of users' personal spaces like as looking from a top personal layer down to a bottom public layer. In conventional groupware, user's workspace is divided into some shared spaces and a personal space to show all of them simultaneously, so the size of the personal space is very restricted. This layered perspective visualization alleviates this problem and also supports users' awareness by always showing shared spaces in background.