RoomWithAView Instant Collaboratorium
Jonathan Schull
8 /10 /2005

Inspired by today’s very stimulating workshop, I find myself updating an idea I was playing around with a year ago as I sought a mechanism for bridging silos at RIT-- virtual collaboratoriums where video-conferencing technologies turn labs and offices scattered around campus (and elsewhere) into flexible, integrated, shared, collaboration spaces. The idea is not new, but newly-available consumer technologies could now be combined create a compact and exciting device that could eventually supplant the speakerphone as a must-have office tool.

The RoomWithAView combines a contemporary compact digital video projector, with a consumer-grade computer, microphone, speakers, two digital cameras, a servo-controlled laser pointer, and networking hardware and software. A pair of these devices creates a shared virtual wall joining two non-adjacent rooms. Users interact with the devices and with each other by pointing handheld laserpointers at the screen. Computer vision heuristics yoke the out-facing camera and the video display to turn the laser pointer into a virtual mouse cursor. When the pointer is directed at the image of an object in the distal room, additional heuristics yoke the pointer to the distal servo-controlled laser, so that it points at the real object in the distal room. All the usual collaboration and communication software packages come standard with the system, along with some others that we are developing, as does a wireless keyboard, etc.

In two years, the entire system could probably be sold for less than the price of a high end digital video projector two years ago.

Precedents. I believe I can cite commercial or research precedents for every aspect of this system including the servo-controlled tele-pointer. But to my knowledge, these functionalities have not been consolidated this way in a single, convenient, functional, device that could serve business, education, entertainment, family communication, and assistive communication. The combination is useful, unobvious and of significant commercial value.

Special considerations for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at RIT.

IEP needs to facilitate cross-disciplinary, cross-college, cross-functional collaboration and interaction, and we need shared collaboration spaces. We need to heighten awareness of the value of, and obstacles to, collaboration at RIT. We need a real world project with commercial potential that faculty and students will care about, and rally around, and use to create an experiential curriculum that will provide real experience, provoke deep, motivated, learning, and expose students to the thrill of discovery, invention, and uncertainty. Conducted as a cross-functional, multi-quarter, interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students, the development and commercialization of this product could both advance the goals of IEP and go a long way toward breaking down institutional barriers that are the biggest to the success of IEP.

Market and ethnographic research conducted on campus should heighten awareness of the program and its aspirations, and force people to take a fresh look at issues of collaboration and experiential learning. Educational and scholarship opportunities for virtually all disciplines at RIT would arise from research and development on hardware, software, and interfaces, development of marketing materials, etc. R and D could begin immediately with resources that are already abundant on campus. The product and the process could become a branding opportunity for IEP and RIT. And once created, the device itself should help foster the kind of collaboration and interaction that can help entrepreneurship and real interdisciplinary collaboration thrive.