Petteri Laamanen
Human factor engineering and usability issues are often the key issues defining the success or failure of CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) applications in the marketplace. The first part of this paper examines some of these human factor issues in detail by using several examples. The second part describes the kinds of applications and technologies there are available for CSCW in the Internet today. Part tree examines the future, and who might be the people that benefit the most from CSCW applications. On these basis it is concluded that a network that interconnects everything and is built on open standards, is a solution for many of the needs that these human factors put on CSCW applications. Internet in one of its' future form will quite probably be this open interconnected network.
CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) is a term that covers a vast variety of applications. Applications range from traditional email and newsgroups, to groupware and sometime in the future to real-time telemeetings. There is no generally accepted definition of CSCW. The lack of generally accepted definition reflects the situation in CSCW research also. The theoretical models as well as the methodologies for designing CSCW applications are only beginning to emerge.
The defition of Computer Supported Collaborative Work used in this paper is: " work by multiple active subjects sharing a common object, supported by information technology"[1] It is the active participation of the subjects that makes CSCW different from the traditional information systems, where the work sequences were predetermined. It should also be noticed that the term "common object" doesn't mean same as "common goal" (too restrictive), neither does it mean only shared material (too loose). For example negotiators may have opposite goals but still share the common object. On the other hand, two people might be using the same database, but the objects of their work might not have anything in common. The term "Internet" is considered in this paper to include both the underlying technologies (such as TCP/IP, WWW, Java etc.) and the infrastructure (i.e. the mesh of interconnected networks).
The purpose of this chapter is to define the basic terms used in this paper and to explain the structure of the paper. Chapter two will discuss human factor engineering and usability issues as the crucial issues in the success or failure of CSCW applications in the marketplace. It will also describe some of the human factor engineering and usability issues involved. Chapter three will present different kinds of CSCW applications and technologies that exist in the Internet today. The list is not exhaustive, but covers the most important categories. Chapter four asks: "Who will benefit the most from CSCW?" and tries to give answers in the short and long term. Chapter five concludes that the present Internet creates a starting point for evolution towards an open interconnected network and for more efficient Computer Supported Collaborative Work.
The studies on why people adopt and use some technologies and abandon others have produced at least two classes of explanation that some theorists pit against each other: individual cost-benefit explanations and social influence explanations.
According to individual cost-benefit explanation, people adopt a technology when the benefits from the adoption exceed the costs. Benefits may be direct such as being able to do tasks faster with the assistance of new technology, or indirect such as prestige received from being an innovator. Similarly, the costs can be direct such as the financial costs of new technology or indirect such as reconciling new norms for interaction with familiar ones.
The "social influence" explanation doesn't focus on the benefits or the costs produced by the new innovation, but on the communication context and process through which potential users learn about and develop their opinions about the innovation. Shared prejudice against computers in a company could be an example of these kinds of a social factors. Starting to use Internet because everybody else is using it might be another example of social factors' influence. [2]
The importance of human factors is emphasized in numerous studies about CSCW application acceptance. Even though social influences might not at first appear so important, they can truly be a question of life and death for a CSCW application. For example a study done in Ontario, Canada suggests that one of the most important things learned during field trials was that "Technology fails often for social, not technical reasons."[3]
In each of the following four chapters, one human related factor is named and results from several field studies are represented. Most of the reasoning is based on cost-benefit explanation. Even if these examples put more emphasis on a cost-benefit explanation, the importance of social influence explanations should not be overlooked.
It is of utmost important for a CSCW application to support the social customs that people are already using. For example it is very hard - if not impossible - to create a casual meeting atmosphere over a video connection if the speaking turns are negotiated through some kind of computer application.
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Figure 1: Seats around the virtual table |
One of the experiments in the Ontario project [4] was to test a four-way meeting system over a video connection. The name of the meeting system was Hydra. In the experiment, four persons were seated around a virtual table as drawn in the upper figure on the right (Figure 1). Each participant had three monitors on his/her desk. Each monitor had a small camera and a microphone installed in it. To create a feeling of an actual seating formation around a table, the three monitors on each participant's desk were arranged to resemble the seating order around the virtual table. The lower figure on the right (Figure 2) shows how the monitors were placed on Sheryl's (one of the participants) desk.
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Figure 2: Monitors placed on Sheryl's desk |
Hydra was very well received because it supported the "real life" ways of negotiating speaking turns etc. As in "real life" everyone was able to talk on each other and so the speaking turns were negotiated with gestures and speaking - just as in an ordinary meeting. The users weren't forced to use computers or some other unnatural ways of getting a speaking turn. It was also very important that the monitors were placed on each participant's desk in the same order as in which the other participants would appear around a real table. This made it possible for each participant to glance quickly if everybody understood what he/she was explaining. This also made it possible to address a question to a certain person just by looking at him/her when stating the question. Even the feeling of leaning towards some person and saying something personal to him/her was possible because the monitors were arranged in this way. [4]
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Figure 3: Cognitive map |
Assistance of computer programs in distributed decision making was studied in Weatherhead School of Management. [5] The distributed decision making process concerns a situation where the problem domain is too complex for one person to understand it in its entirety. In the distributed decision making process, it is essentially important to build mutual knowledge about the matter to be decided on. Common shared knowledge is important for participants to be able to discuss about the matter. It also forms a solid foundation for good decisions. A computer program called SPIDER was introduced to the decision-makers of a selected organization to enhance the distributed decision making. SPIDER is a tool for drawing cognitive maps. A cognitive map is a directed graph whose nodes represent concepts and factors in actor's decision domain, and the arcs represents cause effect among the nodes. Figure 3 shows a very simple cognitive map.
The key success factor in SPIDER was that it augmented the required openness by giving a new tool: the cognitive map. Cognitive maps gave a new way of expressing ideas and concepts and the reasoning behind them. Maps made it possible to see the things from yet another angle and thus increased the communicational bandwidth. With the increased communicational bandwidth it was possible to express one's thoughts more precisely and avoid the obstacles of open communication such as misunderstandings etc. During the field studies, it was also observed that the cognitive map not only helped in the communication between the participants, but it also helped individuals to sketch and develop their own ideas before and during the decision making process [5]
The last example was not as successful as the former two. The idea behind application called Answer Garden's was to enhance organizational learning. It attempted to achieve this by providing an open forum for beginners and experts to communicate. When a beginner had something to, ask he/she could go to Answer Garden's database and try to find a solution to his/her problem. If the answer was not found in the database he/she could send his/her question by email to the system. The system would forward the email to an expert that was free at the moment. The expert could refuse to answer the question if he/she didn't have time to do it. This was arranged to give experts enough time to also do their own work. The question was eventually answered to the sender by one of the experts. The questions and answers were automatically recorded in the database.
After people had used this system for a while it was noticed that the system was utilized but not for the extent that it could have been. This was mainly because the beginners didn't want to disturb the expert with their "stupid" questions. It was also noticed that sometimes the expert's answer was too general for the asker to understand. In these cases it probably would have been better for a beginner to get an answer from another beginner or an advanced user. A Beginner or an advanced user might have experienced the same difficulty just recently and might relate better to the question asked. The source of the failure in Answer Gardens was the rigid hard-coded assumptions. The assumption that beginners always want to ask their questions from experts was false. It was also false to assume that the experts are always the best people to answer the beginner's questions. [6]
Perhaps a forum such as Internet newsgroup would have been better for answering the questions because it supports better the natural social customs of voluntary answering. If the beginners knew that the experts answer the questions voluntarily they wouldn't have felt they are disturbing the experts with their "stupid" questions. It would have been also possible for other users than experts to answer the beginners' questions.
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Figure 4: TWS |
Different people work in different ways. Some use pen and paper for most of tasks, and some others might try to use computer when possible. As suggested by its very name, CSCW is work done by many active participants. Many participants means that there are many different ways of working and possibly many different kinds of tools are also used. It is important for CSCW applications to support as many different kinds of media as possible. People are not keen to learn new applications just to be able to work with each other. They usually want to be able to use the tools they are familiar with and to learn as few new things as possible. CSCW applications at their best should support both computer-supported work (such as word processing etc.) and the work supported by traditional desktop stationary, such as pen and paper. [7]
A good example of a system that supports both the computer-supported work and more traditional ways of working is a system called TeamWorkStation TWS. [7] To support both ways of working in a mixed environment TWS provides a real-time shared workspace by composing a translucent overlay image. This translucent overlay image is composed from several individual workspace images. These individual workspace images can come from computer screens as well as from digital video cameras on users' desks. The overlay image is then distributed to every participant's shared screen monitor. To reduce the cognitive workload also when moving an application to and from the shared workspace each user can share a view of his/her application with the other users just by dragging the application from his/her personal screen to the shared screen.
TWS was well received because it put very little cognitive load on users. For example one user could present his/her new document with the software he/she had used for preparing it. While the other could make remarks "on the document" just by drawing on a paper on his/her desk. Also no new software was introduced for sharing applications' images. The only thing needed for sharing the image of the application was to drag the application on the shared screen. [7]
As the Computer Supported Collaborative Work becomes more common the tasks related to it become more common. People want to learn only very few new computer specific skill just to be able to do collaborative work. How can we introduce increasing number of new CSCW applications to users and not increase the cognitive load substantially? The only way to do this is to automate the most usual tasks as much as possible.
Let's take an example. Today when one wants to arrange a telemeeting he/she has to go through several steps. First, he/she has to negotiate a time that is suitable for all the participants and the resources needed. Then the material has to be delivered to each participant either by email or conventional mail. In the beginning of the meeting, an advanced user or an expert may be needed for setting up the connections. And if it is decided during the meeting, that the meeting should be recorded a help from an expert is needed again. After the meeting an advanced user or an expert is needed again to close down the connections. Afterwards, the minutes of meeting and other documents need to be delivered to all the participants.
The logistic burden of all of these steps makes the use of telemeeting systems less feasible today than what it could be. There are many points during the telemeeting life cycle that could be automated. A field study about automated assistance of telemeeting life cycle suggests the following points as feasible for automation: desire, scheduling, artifact collection and distribution, telemeeting establishment and telemeeting structure. The desire means that there are certain scenarios where desire to arrange a meeting is more likely to appear that in others. The sources of desire can be for example certain organizational decisions, some regularly scheduled meetings or the results of another meeting. After desire there is naturally a need for scheduling a time for meeting that is suitable for all the participants. The collection and distribution of artifacts can be also automated if the list of participants is available. Telemeeting establishment usually concerns setting up several communication channels etc - tasks that aren't usually trivial. There are also a number of points in the meeting structure such as recording of mover and the seconder of a motion that could be automated. Generally speaking tasks that should be automated are the ones that are amenable to automation and have sufficiently high cost so that the benefits of automation can be observed.
The two things that stop us automating these tasks are the lack of access to applications and devices used in the telemeeting life cycle and the lack of knowledge about what to automate and how to automate it. An open interconnected network can overcome the technical problems of automation. After this kind of exhaustively interconnected and open network is available, it is possible to write helper applications that automatically switch on video cameras and run other helper applications in the beginning of the meeting. Open interfaces guarantee that organizations can tailor applications to meet their own requirements. In the short run, the lack of open interconnected network is probably harder to overcome than the lack of knowledge about what to automate. However once the open interconnected network is established it is easier to maintain. The things that could be automated are easy to find out, but are changing all the time since each new application can potentially change the ways of how other applications are used.
A list of design principles for Automated Assistance of the Telemeeting life cycle was also written during the field studies. The design principles listed were the following:
These design principles are results of only one field study but are still quite good starting point for more general guidelines. [8]
In another project the utilization of telepresence was studied. Telepresence means creating a feel of working in the same architectural space among people that are separated by distance. The feel is created by providing online images of co-workers and by offering an opportunity to glance at other people even in the remote offices. Setting up a live video conferencing connection during the teleglancing was made very easy. Easy setup of a video conferencing connection made it possible to virtually go to other person's desk and start to chat. When someone wanted to work without interruption he/she could disable the glancing opportunity. People participating in the trial were at first a little bit suspicious about how they would like the possibility of other people being able to glance at them at their desk. In spite of the prejudices, there were only very few persons that didn't like this glancing opportunity in the end of the experiment. [4]
Later on the researchers even went one step further in integrating the telepresence systems into everyday life of the participants. Sensors of door state were installed in the doors. Through these sensors the telepresence application followed the state of the door and disabled the glancing opportunity if the door was shut. The concept of telepresence with all these new applications and devices was well received since they introduced only very little new skills needed for normal interaction. [4]
As we can see the need for computer specific skills can be greatly reduced if we understand the circumstances where CSCW is used and automate the things that can be automated. To be able to automate these tasks and processes we have to have access to all the applications and the equipment needed in the process. Only a truly open and interconnected network can deliver this kind of access.
Today people who need to use computers tend to be much more mobile. To be efficient, CSCW has to also take into account mobile users. The access to important personal and common information has to be guaranteed everywhere. Access to important information can be accomplished in two non-exclusive ways: carrying the important information with oneself or providing central repositories that are accessible from everywhere. Laptop computers of today are typical examples of carrying the needed information with oneself. The products such as Nokia Communicator 9000 represent in a way the concept of access to central repositories from everywhere. The importance of these central repositories is probably increasing in the future. Central repositories support the natural user laziness. They don't force the user to anticipate what information he/she has to take with him/herself but postpones the time of decision to the actual moment when the information is needed.
The concept of UbiComp [4] was studied in Ontario Project. The idea of UbiComp can be best understood by comparing it to Virtual Reality. While Virtual Reality turns inward to create virtual worlds, UbiComp tries to augment the reality by bringing the digital information as a part of our everyday life with an assistance of highly specialized computers. A UbiComp "computer" typically uses no other user interfaces than the equipment itself. UbiComp needs central repositories and open interconnected networks to give access to the information resources.
UbiComp is characterized by two main attributes: ubiquity and transparency. Ubiquity means that the interaction is not channeled through a single workstation. The access to computation is "everywhere" from watch sized Tabs to whiteboard sized boards. All of these methods of accessing computation are networked. Transparency means that the technology is not intrusive. The use of technology is integrated in everyday life of people in such a way that the users don't even come to think that they are actually using computers. In other words the presence of computers don't intrude into environment of workspace either in terms of physical presence or the activities being performed. [4]
There are many ways of classifying CSCW applications. One way is to separate applications in different categories according to their temporal and spatial characteristics. [8] As we are studying these applications from the Internet user's point of view, the spatial characteristics loose their interest. In this chapter, the applications are divided into two categories by their temporal characteristics. The two temporal categories are asynchronous and synchronous applications. Email and conferencing systems are examples of asynchronous applications, whereas videoconferencing and chatting systems are examples of synchronous applications. Applications are divided into these two classes according to their most dominant features. Within these categories the applications and technologies are grouped according to their offering on the markets rather than on a theoretical basis.
Many of the asynchronous CSCW applications of the Internet today have been around for quite a long time in other environments, also. For example email and conferencing software have been around in mainframe and UNIX machines since the beginning of their existence.
Some of the asynchronous applications such as SMTP email and NNTP news have been the dominant de facto standards in the Internet for such a long time that their technology is accepted and is at least to some extent stable. For other asynchronous applications there is still much standardization to be done, before applications from different vendors can communicate with each other.
Since the asynchronous applications are not as data intensive as synchronous ones, they are not time sensitive and they have been around in Internet quite a while they have also adapted quite well to the latency and limited resources of Internet.
Email is probably the oldest CSCW application around. Email has reached the critical mass in some user groups such as university staff and students, international companies' employees etc. but is still lacking the critical mass among the general public. There have been great difficulties is supporting the international character sets and attachments in the emails. Now, most of these problems are solved to some extent, but there are still things to be done. Especially in making all of the email programs support these new standards. In the past and also today there have been trials to activate the email with different kinds of scripting languages. [9] Today, an ever-increasing number of email programs is supporting HTML-links and maybe this HTML support will replace the need for proprietary scripting languages.
Conferencing systems are systems for asynchronous group discussion by using stored text messages. [10] Conferencing software is sometimes called also newsgroup, discussion group, bulletin board, group annotations, symposium, threads, notes - or sometimes even teleconferencing, meeting or groupware. Some of the conferencing systems need publicly available software (such as NNTP newsreaders) and some need special software that can be used only with those systems. Some of the latest conferencing systems work with an ordinary web browser and don't need any additional installed software.
Most of the conferencing systems organize messages into threads of discussion within a discussion group. But few systems form only one continuous stream of messages per discussion group. The Internet's bandwidth is enough for these applications.
In this group of software, there are clearly two groups of applications. One group comes from older Mainframe and LAN-environment and the other group is developed around new emerging Internet standards of CSCW. The old programs such as Notes, GroupWise and TEAMware are still using the old engines, but have a new wrapper coded on top of the old servers. This new wrapper serves as a Web interface to these old groupware servers. The client side uses an ordinary Web browser as a user interface. The other group of groupware and workflow systems developers is designing and using more or less open Internet standards and proprietary standards for CSCW in Internet. Netscape is a leader of this group. There are products coming to the marketplace from this group also in the near future.
A new feature especially in the products based on the older servers is the integration of business process planing and management software into groupware and workflow products. In these applications the flow of work is automatically declared during the business process design phase. Internets bandwidths are not a substantial obstacle for these applications. [11]
Group calendars have also existed since the first multi-user operating systems. Today most of the Internet group calendars are based on older non-Internet based server systems and are very often integrated tightly with workflow and groupware products. Netscape with its' Calendar Server and Calendar program coming with the Netscape's Communicator suite is the biggest company building its' group calendars using only Internet technologies [11]
Synchronous technologies in Internet are still in their infancy. There are technologies supporting real-time audio and video but still the whole infrastructure of Internet is coming short in supporting them. There is great rush to these real-time audio and video services as they are the technologies of near future. The only synchronous applications working properly in Internet today are the ones that are handling character based data streams. This kind of character based data stream technologies are for example chatting systems and group design and authoring tools.
In the co-authoring and designing systems Internet is usually only the mere transportation media. [12] There are no Internet standards on shared documents and other such shared objects, yet. There are shared object libraries for collaborative working under development but only few of them are ready at the moment.
There have almost always been chatting systems such as WRITE and TALK in UNIX environment. Later came the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the latest line of chatting systems is the one that work with ordinary Web-browsers. These Web-browser based chatting systems activate as an appropriate Web page is entered.
Today Internet is more of a transport technology in telemeeting and videoconferencing systems. The real-time audio has overcome some of the bandwidth problems in Internet but real-time video is still suffering from substantial bandwidth problems. There are very few "Internet standards" on this sector. Standards used in telemeeting and videoconferencing systems are mostly ITU-T standards or developers own proprietary standards.
To overcome the lack of "Internet standards" or example the COMET project has introduced a way to use HTML-pages as a launching base for telemeetings. COMET's solution places the meeting software in Netscape's browser's plug-in and the HTML-link for the telemeeting holds only the "file" containing the information needed for establishing the connection. [13]
Telepresence creates an environment for people in remote offices and cities to work as if they were in the same architectural space. Telepresence uses a wide variety of applications and technologies to fulfill its' goals. Great majority of the information flow generated by telepresence applications is real-time audio and video. Telepresence systems suffer from bandwidth and latency problems of Internet.
"Avatars" and virtual reality technologies are emerging. Avatars are used for visualizing the users in the network. The whole concept of what to use the avatars for is still very much under experimentation and development.
For example, an Internet avatar system called Virtual Places needs a special browser in order to work. After the user has installed this special browser he/she can surf around the net and meet other users' avatars on ordinary HTML pages. All the people who are viewing the same page as the user and have their avatars visible can be seen on the HTML page. When the user moves to another HTML-page his/her avatar follows him/her. The avatars can chat and exchange instant messages. Users can even join guided tours with their avatars. On these guided tours one of the avatars is a driver and the rest of the avatars, who join the tour, will automatically follow the driver. When the driver avatar goes from an HTML-page to another the HTML page on each tour participant's browser will change to that same page. [14]
Virtual reality is also experimental and the VRML (Virtual Reality Markup
Language) seems to be the standard for describing virtual reality environments
in Internet. Virtual reality's 3D models are usually very big so virtual
reality suffers also from the low bandwidth and the high latency of Internet.
Who will benefit the most from CSCW is a question that cannot be answered precisely but some general assumptions about future development can be made. Because everything affects everything in CSCW (technologies suggest, how the work should be done and vice versa) and the acceptance of a CSCW applications depends mostly on human factor issues we have to go ahead developing the CSCW applications with trial and error. Applications evolve gradually and we must observe carefully how the applications are used and what more could be done. Parallel to this all the study results available should be utilized. Unfortunately, there is still only very basic material available about CSCW at the moment.
In the short run the areas that are first utilizing CSCW are not necessarily the areas that will benefit the most from CSCW in the long run. First adapters will probably be the areas that either have users already familiar with computers or the areas where there is enough money to make the applications very easy to use. Also the areas where there are already products in the marketplace or where a lot of research is underway are potential for early adoption of CSCW. For example videoconferencing systems for hospital and businesses are quite probable to become popular because there is enough money in those areas.
As more and more applications are run across the network, the line between a normal application and a computer supported collaborative work application becomes blurred. For example, in the future we could be able to share a part of our screen with other users. [13] When the sharing of an application is as easy as dragging an application to a certain location on the screen practically every application can be considered as a kind of a CSCW application.
If we predict the areas that will benefit the most from CSCW in long run we have to base our predictions more on the basic nature of human interaction. Studies have shown that the better people know each other, the less bandwidth they will need in their communication. Two people hardly knowing each other might need to talk in person about a matter that could be discussed via email between two people very familiar to each other. [15] Of course the benefits of communicational bandwidth are always relative. A videoconference can become popular because it has more communicational bandwidth than a phone call even if it doesn't have even nearly as much communicational bandwidth as a real meeting. With a greater bandwidth than a phone call videoconferencing can replace the need for meeting in person for example after a business deal is closed. Because a videoconference hardly ever reaches the communicational bandwidth of meeting in person it will never substitute the real meetings entirely.
In the long run, once the open interconnected network is established the whole concept of CSCW will change. Computers and CSCW applications might seem so transparent in the future that people don't in fact come to think that they are using computers. In the future it seems very natural that an entrepreneur does some of the bookkeeping him/herself and let the accountant do only the most difficult parts. When the entrepreneur starts the bookkeeping he/she just clicks a link or an icon in the Internet and does the job. Later on an accountant can see what the entrepreneur has done and does the rest of the bookkeeping. Same way an architect might negotiate with a construction engineer with a videoconferencing connection. If they need they might even make a tour in the virtual building.
The market forces and the lack of knowledge what will be invented in the future will severely restrict the forecasting who will benefit the most from CSCW in the long run. The ways of how CSCW applications are implemented will change a great deal over time. An implementation change might result to new unsuspected ways of using applications and the result of this chain reaction cannot be forecasted.
The development towards more efficient CSCW will happen in many steps. There won't be one killer application that would change everything over night. Instead there will be many small and few little bit bigger innovations that will gradually change the collaborative work easier and more transparent.
If we study the requirements of more usable and thus more efficient computer supported collaborative work applications, we can see that there are two very basic elements that are missing today. The first requirement is a network that interconnects every device . The second requirement is the use of open standards in this network so that every device from everywhere can understand each other.
The Internet as it is today, is a starting point for an evolution towards this open interconnected network. Today the Internet is by far the most widely spread network and connects more computers together than any network ever before. It is based on open recommendations - RFC's (Request For Comment) - that can be considered as standards. The fact that RFC's don't go through exhaustive negotiation process enables them to be established quickly. The light "standardization" process makes it possible for technologies such as World Wide Web to become popular and grow as fast as they have.
There is a lot to be done before Internet can be said to fulfill the requirements of CSCW applications. There are numerous problems such as security and bandwidth problems. Also the IP address space will run out quite soon if nothing is done. In spite of all these problems the Internet has survived so far and is likely to survive in the future. Hopefully, one day we will have a truly open and interconnected network that enables more efficient Computer Supported Collaborative Work. Internet in one of its' future forms will quite probably be this open interconnected network. And who knows, maybe your workroom's door might be connected to Internet on that day.
| Conferencing system | Software for asynchronous group discussion by using stored text messages. |
| CSCW | Computer Supported Cooperative Work ; work by multiple active subjects sharing a common object, supported by information technology |
| HTML | Hypertext Markup Language ; A language used to create pages in the WWW. |
| IRC | Internet Relay Chat ; popular Internet chatting program developed in Finland |
| Telemeeting | A meeting held by the assistance of telecommunication and computer devices. |
| Telepresence | Telepresence creates an environment for people working in the remote offices and cities to work as if they were in the same architectural space. |
| UbiComp | UbiComp is augmenting the reality by bringing the computation everywhere and making it transparent with a great number of highly specialized computers. |
| WWW | World Wide Web ; A set of technologies to provide interconnection between HTML documents by the use of HTML links. |