MiMeG –The MixedMediaGrid

NCeSS node

University of Bristol &Kings College London

Key areas of research

• Building on VidGrid pilot project• Identifying needs of qualitative social

science user communities• Understanding social scientific practice• Synchronous and Asynchronous

support for mixed media qualitative analysis

• Capacity building across the social sciences, training, software roll-out programme

Studies of social science practice

• Scope of existing systems

• Interviews with expert practitioners

• Observational studies of existing practices

• Studies of MiMeG system in use

Shared real-time text and graphics annotations

Mimio receiver Mimio pen

Boundary microphone Speaker

Image projected to screen

Web data services for long-term data analysis

EQUIP dataspace

Slave

SlaveMaster

Slave

Digital video store

Digital video store

Digital video store

Digital video store

Control event

Annotation event

Off-Screen Annotations

• (full paper at CHI 2007)• Enable remote understanding of pace

and position of off-screen movement– Especially off-screen to on-screen transitions

• Requires two components:– Real-time tracking of local off-screen

position– Visualising at remote site(s) appropriately

Tracking Annotations

Ultrasound Receiver

GumstixComputer

Electronic WhiteboardMarker

Bluetooth Aerial

Battery

Response time results

StreamerOrbCrosshairNone

Visualization

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0

Res

po

nse

tim

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StreamerOrbCrosshairNone

Visualization

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0

Res

po

nse

tim

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)

Response time results

1 second

Studies of MiMeG system in use

• (full paper at ECSCW 2007)• Some groups have agreed to be studied

in using the software in greater depth• describes the mechanisms researchers

use to manage distributed analysis– Local/remote activities– Gestures and imitation

• Significant evidence that managing local work is useful for distributed collaboration

Next Steps

• Do we aim to preserve/amplify existing practice? (which we have ethnographic evidence works for users) or do we aim to alter practice (based on experimental studies that say collaborative responses are easier to predict)

• What do we really want our software to do here – to support or to alter existing practice?

• Can we generate new domains of practice in real-time distributed research – is this a better commercial space than traditional workplaces?

Next Steps• Studies of distributed research practice in

CSCW are few and lack detail• Buxton’s (1992) Telepresence challenge

remains– integrating task-focused activities with object-

focused activities is still tough

• Real time groupware needs to move into the real world more, and perhaps researchers offer an improved testbed than traditional workplaces for real-time distributed tools