Braccetto is a collaborative project in human-computer interaction. It aims to develop sophisticated information sharing technology that can help geographically distributed teams collaborate more effectively.
Braccetto, meaning ‘arm in arm’ in Italian,is researching the principles underlying effective remote collaboration. The results of this investigation may provide new ways of supporting geographically dispersed teams involved in creative activities such as collaborative design, planning, analysis and decision making.
The project is developing new methods for supporting simultaneous work on software applications between sites in conjunction with tightly linked, high-quality, multi-party telepresence technology. The project will evaluate how these methods improve the productivity of teams and team members’ awareness of co-workers.
Braccetto is a project within the HxI Initiative, a research collaboration between Australia’s leading publicly funded research organisations – CSIRO, DSTO and NICTA.
While the increasing use of ICT in business environments has delivered significant productivity benefits, it has also brought challenges for information workers. Many people struggle with information overload and find it hard to extract useful insights from the huge amounts of information they process each day.
In addition, the nature of global business means people often need to work as part of geographically dispersed teams. Organisations are looking to improve the way employees interact and create environments that encourage effective collaboration and knowledge sharing, even across large distances.
Braccetto intends to develop technologies to support people in their interactions with each other. Insights and intellectual property developed by the project will be evaluated for use in areas such as national security, emergency management and distributed scientific research, and to benefit the Australian economy.
Who will benefit?
Outcomes will have application in a wide range of industries where geographically dispersed creative teamwork is undertaken. This may include post-production, mining and mineral exploration, defence planning, infrastructure design and planning, manufacturing design and distributed scientific teams.
What are the key features?
Braccetto will create new models of human-computer interaction and will run a series of experiments to validate hypotheses from these models. Results will contribute to human-computer interaction theory. New concepts will be implemented from these models to improve criteria such as productivity, performance and team effectiveness between remote co-workers.
This will result in an integrated telepresence software platform, supporting two to three users at multiple sites. As part of the interface overlaying any applications (such as Microsoft Word, CAD or video editors) every user will have his or her own cursor and simultaneous control.
The team is investigating a range of mixed presence groupware capabilities including a national research and transitioning platform called Braccetto TeamNets. The research includes awareness approaches and tools such as: ambient awareness interfaces; new interaction devices; integrated telepresence approaches such as the use of spatial audio; low latency audio codecs and high-definition video; operating system-level multi-input and multimodal interaction.
For more information, please visit the HxI Initiative website.
Research team:
Markus Rittenbruch - NICTA Project Leader
Kelvin Cheng - Researcher
Gregor McEwan - Research Engineer
An Zhao - Research Assistant
Paul Sztajer - Research Assistant
Kenton O'Hara - HxI Research Director
David Smith - HxI Project Manager
Participants: The project includes researchers at DSTO, CSIRO, the University of South Australia and the University of Sydney. The key representatives from these organisations are:
Tim Pattison – Head, Human Interaction Capabilities, DSTO
Peter Evdokiou – Manager, Experimental Research Systems, DSTO
Christian Müller-Tomfelde - Research Scientist, CSIRO
Jeni Paay - Interaction Design Lead, CSIRO
Jesper Kjeldskov - Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO
Bruce Thomas - Director of the Wearable Computer Laboratory, The University of South Australia
Masa Takatsuka - Director of the Visualization and High-Performance Computing Laboratory, The University of Sydney
Publications
2009
Rittenbruch, M., McEwan, G., An Historical Reflection of Awareness in Collaboration Awareness systems: Advances in Theory, Methodology and Design, Springer, 2009 (to appear June 09).
Rittenbruch, M., Mansfield, T., Viller, S., Design and Evaluation of Intentionally Enriched Awareness Awareness systems: Advances in Theory, Methodology and Design, Springer, 2009 (to appear June 09).
Greenberg, S., McEwan, G. and Rounding, M. Reflecting on Several Metaphors of MUD-Based Media Spaces. In: Harrison, S. (Ed) Media Space. Reflecting on 20+ years of mediated life. Springer, 2009 (to appear).
O’Hara, K. (2009) Reflections on Mobile Video Telephony and Media Spaces. In: Harrison, S. (Ed) Media Space. Reflecting on 20+ years of mediated life. Springer, 2009 (to appear).
Müller-Tomfelde, C. & Chen, F. (2009) Temporal and Spatial Aspects of Pointing Gestures In F. Grifoni, P. (ed.) Handbook of Research on Multimodal Human Computer Interaction and Pervasive Services: Evolutionary Techniques for Improving Accessibility, IGI Global Inc.
Müller-Tomfelde, C. (2009) Investigating Temporal-Spatial Characteristics of Mouse and Touch Input. In Proceedings of Interact 2009, 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction, Uppsala, Sweden.
2008
Hutterer, P and Thomas, B.H, Enabling Co-located Ad-hoc Collaboration on Shared Displays Proceedings of the 9th Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC2008), Woollongong, NSW, Australia, 22-25 Jan 2008. B. Plimmer and G. Weber, Eds.
Li, Jane., Mansfield, T., Hansen, S., Supporting Enhanced Collaboration in Distributed Multidisciplinary Care Team Meetings, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, Jyväskylä, Finland, June, 2008.
Bezerianos, A., McEwan, G., Presence Disparity in Mixed Presence Collaboration. Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’08), Work-in-progress track. Florence, Italy, April 5 - 10, 2008, ACM Press.
Yuille, J., Vaughan, L., Rittenbruch, M., Viller, S., MacColl, I. Spontaneous scenarios: an approach to user engagement, Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’08), Work-in-progress track. Florence, Italy, April 5 - 10, 2008, ACM Press.
McEwan, G. and O'Hara, K. (2008) Blended Spaces to Support Distributed Teams. In CSCW '08 Workshop on Supporting Distributed Teamwork, San Diego, CA, USA.
Li, J., Robertson, T., Hansen, S., Mansfield, T., and Kjeldskov, J. (2008 ) Multidisciplinary Medical Team Meetings: A Field Study of Collaboration in Health Care. In Proceedings of OzCHI 08, Cairns, Australia.
Hansen, S., Robertson, T. Laurie Wilson, L (2008). Using an Action Research Approach to Design a Telemedicine System for Critical Care: A Reflection. In Proceedings of OzCHI 08, Cairns Australia.
Müller-Tomfelde, C., Wessels, A. and Schremmer, C. (2008) Tilted tabletops: In between horizontal and vertical workspaces. In Proceedings of TABLETOP '08, the Third Annual IEEE International Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces
2007
Young, J., Mcewan, G., Greenberg, S., Sharlin, E., Moving a Media Space into the Real World through Group-Robot Interaction. (Poster Presentation) Pervasive 2007, the Fifth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Toronto, Canada, May, 2007.
Gutwin, C., Greenberg, S., Blum, R., Dyck, J., Tee, K., Mcewan, G., Supporting Informal Collaboration in Shared-Workspace Groupware. Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS) (accepted for publication Sep 2007).
Romero, N., Mcewan, G., Greenberg, S., Field Study of Community Bar: (Mis)-matches between Theory and Practice. The ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP), Sanibel Island, USA, pp. 89-98, November 2007.
Mcewan, G., Rittenbruch, M., Mansfield, T. Understanding Awareness in Mixed Presence Collaboration. Proceedings of the Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (OzCHI), Adelaide Australia, pp. 171-174, November, 2007.
Zhao, A., Robust Histogram-Based Object Tracking in Image Sequences. Proceedings of 9th Digital Image Computing Techniques and Applications (DICTA 2007), Adelaide, Australia, pp. 45-52, December, 2007
Bezerianos, A., Using Alternative Views for Layout, Comparison and Context Switching Tasks in Wall Displays Proceedings of Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (OzCHI), Adelaide, Australia, pp. 303-310, December, 2007.
Zhao, A., Brooks, M. J., Dick, A. R. Enhanced Appearance Models for Object Tracking, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Image and Graphics (ICIG), IEEE Press, 2007, pp. 513-518.
Epps, J., Close, B., A study of Co-worker Awareness in Remote Collaboration over a Shared Application, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’07), San Jose, California, USA April 28 - May 03, 2007, ACM Press.
Schremmer, C., Krumm-Heller, A., Vernik, R., Epps, J., Design Discussion of the [braccetto] Research Platform: Supporting Distributed Intensely Collaborating Creative Teams of Teams. Proceedings of HCII’07, Springer LNCS 4553, pp.722-734, 2007.
Müller-Tomfelde, C.,Kellar, B and Eades, P., HxI: An Australian Initiative in ICT-Augmented Human Interactivity. Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2007), Springer LNCS, pp. 675 – 676, 2007.
Stavrakakis, J., Takatsuka., M., Out-Of-Order Execution For Avoiding Head-Of-Line Blocking In Remote 3D Graphics, Proceedings of IEEE Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology (PSIVT2007), 2007.
Ng, C. J., Takatsuka, M., Bonjour-based collaboration service in a remote collaboration environment. Proceedings of Apple University Consortium Conference, September 2007.
2006
Schremmer, C., Epps, J., Vernik, R. (2006). Distributed Intense Collaborative Interaction – Research Challenges in eResearch. In Proc. 20th HCI conference 2006, Queen Mary, University of London, 11-15 September 2006. Volume 2, p260, ISSN1470-5559. Workshop "Combining Visualisation and Interaction to Facilitate Scientific Exploration and Discovery".
Vernik, R.J., Epps, J., Schremmer, C. (2007) The 'x' Factor in Human Interacctivity In Proc. International Conference on CSCW in Design (CSCWD), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, April 26 - 28.
Vernik, R.J., Krumm-Heller, A., Evdokiou, P., Epps, J., Phillips, M., Johnson, S., Weber, D. (2006) A Reference Architecture for [braccetto] Composable Collaboration Systems In Proc. Australasian Computer Human Interaction Conference (OzCHI). Sydney, Australia. November 20 - 24.