１．担当ＰＭ

　Alan　Kay(アラン ケイ) 　　（President, Viewpoints Research Institute ）

２．採択者氏名

３．プロジェクト管理組織

　有限会社アカデミア

４．委託金支払額

　9,577,841円

５．テーマ名

　SeeThroughTalk - a collaborative image space

６．関連Webサイト

　http://swikis.ddo.jp/SeeThroughTalk/

７．プロジェクト概要

There have been many team-programming tools considered both in the academic and industrial fields.
However, their paradigms are mainly based on the integrity of source codes. They do not cope with the real factor essential in the success of team development - the dynamic interaction among members.
Therefore, we would like to propose a true collaborative working space in Smalltalk. It focuses on human interactions, and supports 'Ma' (Japanese word) in the collaboration. It encourages dynamic interactions while not preventing each member's intensive work ('Ma' means a comfortable distance between people).
SeeThroughTalk extends a popular desktop metaphor to team working. It introduces a new overlapping desktop system to the existing Morphic GUI. Through the half-transparent desktop, members can see their partners as live objects (avatars, and related windows). SeeThroughTalk enables us to develop shared work collaboratively while not disturbing each individual's concentration. It is useful for programming in a distributed team, or other activities such as tile-scripting by children in remote sites. It can also serve as a dynamic collaboration wall when it is used with the Croquet environment.

８．採択理由

This is a new approach to shared spaces that also have easy privacy. The central idea is that various kinds of translucencies can allow private work to be done while also being aware of the public activities of other collaborators. This has some interesting possible intersections with the past work of Hiroshi Ishii on "translucent collaboration" before he went to MIT. Though there have been many attempts to do workable collaborative environments in the past, especially for programming, we don't yet know of a really good one -- and we need better efforts in this area. This proposal has several ideas that will be quite worthwhile to be explored.

９．プロジェクト評価

This was an ambitious and useful project to make an immersive and usable real-time shared programming and debugging environment for Squeak. The researcher now has some excellent demos that can be shared and used as a basis for continuing research and implementation. This project has the potential to be combined with others (the World Stethoscope, or "Skeleton") to make even a greater impact. This is excellent work.