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primarily drawing upon computer supported co-located collaborative literature.
Then section 3.4 presents information visualization specific issues that may need
re-consideration in light of co-located collaborative applications.
3.1 Related Research
Co-located collaborative information visualization is a relatively new and still
under explored research area. Only a few tools designed specifically to support
synchronous collaboration between co-located people using visualizations to ex-
plore information have emerged thus far. These are discussed below. However,
as noted below, existing visualization tools designed from a single-user perspec-
tive have been studied with co-located collaborative tasks [61]. There has been
considerable research in the area of scientific visualization in distributed systems
(see [38] for an overview). Recently, there has been new primarily web-based re-
search on asynchronous distributed collaborative information visualization sys-
tems. This new direction is the focus of section 4.
Co-located Collaborative Visualization:
TheResponsiveWorkbenchwas
one of the first visualization systems for developed co-located collaboration
around a large horizontal surface [103]. The responsive workbench is a virtual
reality environment in which the displayed 3D scene is seen through shuttered
glasses and interaction is achieved with a glove which has an attached Polhemus
sensor on the back. Agrawala et al. [1] extended this workbench to support two
simultaneous users. Several scientific visualization applications were developed
for this platform including fluid dynamics and situational awareness applications.
On tabletop displays information visualization interaction techniques have
been used to support co-located people in information sharing and exploration
tasks. DTLens [35] provides a local non-linear magnification technique enabling
multiple lenses for up to four people with for two-handed interaction. Personal
Digital Historian uses radial layouts to display photos, video and text documents
to supports conversation and story telling for small groups of people [84].
Studying Collaborative Use of Information Visualizations:
While re-
search on collaborative data analysis using information visualizations is relatively
scarce, collaborative use of existing single user systems has been studied. Mark
and Kobsa [61] conducted a user study in which they observed pairs working
in co-located and distributed settings with two different visualization systems
designed for single users. Their findings suggest that the benefit of collaborative
vs. individual problem solving was heavily dependent on the visualization sys-
tem used and also that, in general, groups were better than individuals working
alone at locating errors. From this study, they derive a model for the collabora-
tive problem-solving process. Their model consists of an iterative sequence of five
stages: parsing a question, mapping variables to the program, finding the cor-
rect visualization, and two validation stages. From studying collaborative work
on scientific visualizations in virtual environments using CAVEs, Park et al. [72]
report a five-step activity model that was common for the observed collaboration
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