Bringing Media Spaces into the Real World

This paper describes an experiment to test the media space concepts developed at Rank Xerox EuroPARC in a “real world” setting, that is a distributed product development organization within a large multinational corporation. We installed two types of media space connections: a focused dial up video-phone for engineering problem solving between designers in England and the shop floor of a factory in the Netherlands; an unfocused “office share” to support administrative tasks. The results of user observation are that the video links did prove to be effective for problem solving on the shop floor, enhancing cooperation, mutual trust and confidence, and for supporting new forms of communication in the virtual shared office. We observed that users integrated very quickly the new video links into their existing media space made up of telephone, beepers, satellite video conference, fax, e-mail, answering machines, etc. Users learnt very easily how to shift from one medium to another. This suggests that “real world” media spaces should be designed to allow a userdriven smooth transition from one medium to another according to the task at hand and the bandwidth available: from live video to stored video; from moving video to still frames; from multimedia spaces to shared computing spaces for synchronous sketching and asynchronous message posting; from two user conversation to multi-user conference call.