Integrating Pervasive Information Acquisition to Enhance Workspace Awareness

Workspace awareness as the "... up-to-the-moment understanding of another person’s interaction with a shared workspace" [GuGr 99] involves knowledge on who is working in the workspace, where individuals are working, what they are doing or going to do, how and when they are executing their work, and what their motivation is for doing it (why). Traditional awareness systems use dynamic user behavior data as collected while monitoring events from I/O devices (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen) at the interface to user. To preserve and maintain a more intuitive fidelity of awareness, we extend our workspace awareness system TEAMSPACE to collect and exploit awareness information from the users physical activities in his workspace, like hand guesture and body movement, using position and orientation tracking technologies. Thus user activities aside the interaction with desktop computing facilities are seamlessly integrated into a shared virtual workspace opening a whole new dimension of awareness abilities.