Designing and examining PC to Palm collaboration

One trend in day-to-day computing involves moving seamlessly from large powerful workstations to small hand-held devices. A second trend is continuous collaboration with colleagues. Combining these trends requires solutions to both the problem of transferring large complex displays to smaller, less capable devices and of ensuring that a viable collaboration takes place even when the collaborators are using vastly different tools and viewing screen environments that differ significantly in their display richness. We briefly describe an architecture for managing displays across multiple platforms, which we call the Manifold framework. This architecture is incorporated into applications using our DISCIPLE collaboration system. We explore the use of Manifold by creating a 3D layout task that communicates with a 2D version of this task running on a Palm Pilot that is wirelessly connected to the Internet. In order to get measurable data on the collaboration problems and successes that users might encounter in this diverse communication tool arrangement, we ran two separate studies that captured the performance time, user errors and transcripts of the communication exchanges between the two users. We found that interface problems with each environment affected the task performance and that the different capabilities of the 3D and 2D environments created collaborative advantages rather than negatively affecting the collaboration.