Nicole Yankelovich’s research while affiliated with Sporian Microsystems Inc. and other places

Open Wonderland is a toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds. The system architecture, based entirely on open standards, is highly modular and designed with a focus on extensibility. In this article, the authors articulate design goals related to collaboration, extensibility, and federation and describe the Open Wonderland architecture, including the design of the server, the client, the communications layer, and the extensibility mechanisms. They also discuss the trade-offs made in implementing the architecture.

This paper addresses ways users can remotely control industrial hardware devices over the Internet. We employ a J2EE based Remote Lab platform to describe the interface of the remote devices and to relay commands and results between users and devices. Collaboration is accomplished by embed ding the remote lab platform in an Open Wonderland virtual world.

The main premise of this chapter is that speech applications will be more usable if they follow the conventions of natural human dialog. Understanding how natural dialogs take place in the application domain serves as an effective starting point for a speech user interface design. This chapter reports on natural dialog studies that take place in the earliest stages of an application life cycle, prior to any system design or functional specification. Not only do these studies help in the design of grammars, feedback, and prompts, but they also point out instances where speech technology cannot be effectively applied. Natural dialog studies help to uncover common patterns of behavior and can reveal unexpected insights that significantly improve application design. Occasionally, observing participants in a natural setting can even trigger the rethinking of basic design assumptions. The natural dialog studies described in this chapter were conducted in the process of designing four experimental applications built by the Speech Applications Group at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Each of these applications attempted to push the bounds of conversational interaction, given the constraints of current speech technology. Of the four case studies described, two are for speech-only systems and two involve multimodal systems: (1) The SpeechActs Calendar, a telephone-based system to access an online calendar, (2) The Office Monitor, a walk-up speech interface which offers information and takes messages when an office occupant is out, (3) The Automated Customer Service Representative, a multimodal version of the Lands’ End catalog that allows users to query with speech and see the results on an interactive television display, and (4) Multimodal Drawing, a speech-enhanced user interface to a drawing editor. The study descriptions conclude with a summary of lessons learned about general speech user interface concepts.

This paper describes a telepresence device called Porta- Person. This is the first project in a larger initiative known as the Connected Conference Room, which aims to improve the user experience for remote people connected to meetings taking place in conference rooms. The Porta-Person is designed to enhance a sense of social presence for remote meeting participants. It does this by providing a high-fidelity audio connection and a remotely controlled telepresence display with video or animation.

By extending a social network visualization to include a keyword search for experts, Constellation enables users to discover and explore the social connections between experts and then map the shortest path between themselves and these clusters. In this way, a social network visualization tool provides a mechanism for identifying, locating, and connecting to distant experts.

In this paper, we describe a range of audio problems that impact the effectiveness of audio conferences and detail the solutions we have devised to address these problems. We conducted an audio quality assessment to determine how differences in quality impact audio clarity, a remote person's experience connecting to a conference room , and social presence. Based on the results of this assessment, we examine the costs and benefits of increasing audio fidelity with respect to the network resources needed to support high-fidelity audio conferencing.

Out-of-band communication during audio conferences can improve the effectiveness of distributed meetings. It provides a means for people to privately consult with one another, supports breakout sessions, and allows individuals to resolve problems without interrupting the discussion. Conversely, off-topic chat and poorly timed interruptions can degrade meeting effectiveness. We considered these trade-offs in adding a private text chat capability and a novel, multi-channel voice chat feature to the Meeting Central collaboration suite. In this paper, we explain the motivation behind adding these features and then describe our initial implementation, the usability and field testing we conducted, and the changes that we made as a result of that user research.

Using Office Central, remote workers can "advertise" their presence in public spaces within offices, such as break areas, lounges or cafeterias. The design concept is to encourage informal, unplanned interactions between remote workers and those who pass through the public spaces. In this prototype installation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, we set up a lounge area with an Office Central picture window display (Figure 1). The local people in the lounge, wearing RFID tags for identification, could chat informally with remote people using a high-fidelity, CD-quality audio channel. The virtual meeting places included audio and video content, designed to be experienced jointly by the local and remote people. Some content was also tailored to the local people, updating as they approached the picture window display.

The Meeting Central prototype is a suite of collaboration tools designed to support distributed meetings. The tools' minimalist design provides only those features that have the most impact on distributed meeting effectiveness. The collaboration suite is built on top of a distributed, extensible, and scalable framework.

This work explores how comparing web navigation histories between two people and presenting the results to them might allow them to gain insight about each other. We developed a prototype that presents web matches sorted according to frequency, recency, and web site. Interviews with users of the prototype suggest that common interests and preferences can be inferred from these comparisons.