Project SHASTRA:
Distributed and Collaborative Multimedia Synthetic Environments for Geometric Design

Research Associate: I. Ihm

Research Assistants: F. Bernardini, J. Chen, S. Cutchin, S. Evans, K. Lin, R. Merkert, P. Ning, D. Schikore, P. Zhang

Sponsors: ARO, ONR

We are building a prototype CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) infrastructure at the core of a multi-user distributed and collaborative scientific manipulation environment called SHASTRA, which we have implemented on the multimedia desktop [1,2]. This application conferencing substrate facilitates user level cooperation and supports many modes of asynchronous and synchronous multiple-user interaction. We hope to demonstrate how the communication and collaboration facilities of this substrate helps us to build shared workspaces with multimedia interfaces, and how they can be used to design sophisticated collaborative problem solving environments.

We are currently building three example scenarios:

• air/land/sea defense

• human body walk through

• underwater world