Infrastructure for Multi-User, Multi-Spatial Collaborative Environments

Recent research into intelligent environments (Nixon et al., 1999; Coen, 1998) has focused primarily on systems where a single user interacts with a single intelligent space, through the use of speech, gestures, or more mundane keyboard input. These systems often ignore handling multiple people, yet much interaction occurs in a conference or meeting room, with multiple people interacting with each other rather than with a computer presence. In addition, these research efforts usually limit themselves to a single intelligent environment. As the Oxygen project moves us towards a world where people move between intelligent spaces, we need to create spaces that can react differently based on the people who are within them, and which can work together to serve the needs of the users.