Perspective layered workspace for collaborative work

Visual shared workspaces for synchronous groupware will be always staying on users´ screens in the near future. Users will be moving frequently between their personal spaces for personal and asynchronous work and shared spaces for communication and synchronous cooperation. For supporting such situation, this paper proposes a new technique to visualize workspaces as a set of layered virtual screens in pseudo-3-dimensional graphics. In this way, groups´ shared workspaces are shown as background of users´ personal workspaces like as looking from a top personal layer down to a bottom public layer. This 3-dimensional perspective visualization is also suitable for transmitting everyday awareness. Therefore, the visualization has potential to be the user interface of integrated groupware platforms