The persistence project tackles a problem that arises in the use of facilities like iSpaces and their interactive screens. If the space were dedicated to a single project full time, people would be able to come and go at will, with material spread around on the various devices, visible to whoever uses the room whenever they want. But in any real setting, a technological resource of this type will be shared among many projects. It needs to be treated in the same way as a time-sharing computer system. Whenever someone is using it, they feel it is theirs, but in the meantime, someone else can be "swapped in" and out. There are several dimensions to providing an appropriate persistent environment for an activity. These include:
- The visual surfaces. This is the closest digital analog to the physical project-room environment, and includes not only the wall-based displays but displays on other devices such as laptops as well.
- The information collection. This includes the documents, images, web pages, etc. that are relevant to the work, and have in some way or another been brought into the workspace. Not all will be visible at any one time.
- The application context. This includes the state of running applications on devices in the workspace.
We want to support several different uses:
- The ability to suspend and then resume in the same environment with things in the state they were in. This is the basic idea, and is impossible to achieve in full (for discusion see the persistence white paper). However it is possible to put things into a state that approximates the suspended state well.
- The ability to resume in a modified environment. This includes the possibility of hardware failures or changes to the space between sessions, the ability to resume a state in a restricted environment (e.g., on a workstation for post-meeting work) or set up a state in one environment (e.g., a workstation) to be used in another (e.g., an interactive workspace).
- The ability to mirror in a different environment. This is like resuming in a modified environment, except that the original environment is also active at the same time. This is needed for tele-meetings in which multiple workspaces are involved.
See persistence site for further details.
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