Participating faculty:
We have developed an annotation tool,
"sticky notes," for facilitating distributed collaboration for 3D modeling
and visualization. Sticky notes are small 3D objects that coexist with and
augment the host 3D objects. Sticky notes provide a convenient way for people
to annotate (with both text and audio) a model. However, our note mechanisms go
beyond simple passive annotation to also provide active interactivity. We introduce the action notes that
perform operations on-demand, and the active notes that monitor the environment
for specific events and automatically handle such events when they occur
without the user intervention. Sticky notes also exhibit levels-of-detail
behaviors that adapt their appearance for optimal viewing. As a demonstration
of concept, we use sticky notes for an application in collaborative
visualization of protein data from the
Protein Data Bank. The application environment centers on a "virtual
lab," which comprises a number of "virtual workbenches." Each workbench
accommodates a group of geographically distributed users collaborating on a
protein model. The users of a
workbench can annotate the model with sticky notes and share these notes.
Sticky notes thus allow sharing of ideas, enable joint attention, and
facilitate group work.