[AG-TECH] Pertinent persistence

Wenjun Liu wliu at mcs.anl.gov
Fri Mar 14 09:16:52 CST 2003


Hi,

So far, I got six responses to my persistent space question, many of which
are really helpful. I would like to summarize what we learned so far and
propose a persistent push on this thread. 

As most responses indicate, persistent space question have two sides:
available physical place and pertinent virtual space. Current AG nodes are
likely located in places for other purposes that make persistence
problematic. Besides, having AG nodes always on requires quite a bit of
maintaining efforts. On the virtual space side, virtual venues seem
limited (?) and no dedicated vv for specific interest groups to always on
without worrying about privacy problems. In addition, it seems that
providing a persistent space for all nodes from the large AG community to
casual encounter each other is a nave wish. To really use persistent space
requires pertinent interests, trust, and high quality video to make
participants feel comfortable (won't cause virtual reality-induced
symptoms and effects or VRISE), which is usually better off with a small
group of 6 to12 people. Given all that, we sill have to deal with
communicative asymmetry problem, that is, when one party tries to initiate
an interaction with another, visual gestures, gazes, and the articulation
of talks are often not symmetrically perceived by the other party. Last
but not least, there are other researches going on about persistent space
that we may see soon. 

All these seem good reasons for us to push this thread of discussion
further. I know there were many productive discussions in AG-TECH (and
recently in AG-USERS). But all those discussions seemed to be point
activities, that is, many responses to one question at a point of time and
then no more group efforts on it. This time, I would like to keep this
interest in persistent space persistent. I propose that we set up a
distributed group (of our seven souls first, others welcome to join) based
on the same research interest to continue work on it until we get
something that makes a real contribution, theoretically and empirically,
to AG technology and CSCW.

I remember there were other efforts in AG community that tried to play the
social first (for example, set up a band over AG and beer festivals) and
hope for collaboration later. Our approach is different: we share a same
interest first and will build our social bond later (I am sending a
separate email to all six with details). Will we succeed this time?

Thanks,

Wenjun





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