PicShare: A Capture-Centric Remote Collaboration Tool

remote collaboration, casual capture, imaging, scanners Sharing images or documents is a natural activity between people both at work and in their social life. Sharing between remotely-located people is now possible through one of the many remote collaborations tools available on the market. However, none of them was particularly designed with image sharing in mind. This short technical report describes the principles of a prototype remote collaboration application we developed called PicShare that is tailored to sharing and discussing captured images of any kind. The concept of PicShare was developed to systematically satisfy some basic user needs when sharing material captured with a scanner or a digital camera. These needs are seamless integration with a capture device, a collaboration session encompassing a set of images, the selection images and their views and pointing, all without appreciable delay and assured consistency between the local and remote views. PicShare addresses all these issues in a single integrated solution that runs on the top of the ubiquitous NetMeeting ® videoconferencing application. Observation of PicShare usage by a small number of early users showed that their experience was greatly enhanced when compared to that with existing general purpose application-sharing tools. The integration of PicShare with a prototype desktop face-up scanner and its 2-seconds capture-to-share time has also stimulated thinking of the device itself as a remote collaboration tool, for instance through hand-written sketches or 3D objects that are captured and shared and discussed synchronously.