We describe the design of tangible interfaces to the KidPad collaborative drawing tool. Our aims are to support the re-enactment of stories to audiences, and integration within real classroom environments. A six-month iterative design process, working with children and teachers in school, has produced the “magic carpet”, an interface that uses pressure mats and video-tracked and barcoded physical props to navigate a story in KidPad. Reflecting on this process, we propose four guidelines for the design of tangible interfaces for the classroom. (1) Use physical size and shysical props to encourage collaboration. (2) Be aware of how different interfaces emphasize different actions. (3) Be aware that superficial changes to the design can produce very different physical interactions. (4) Focus on open low-tech technologies rather than (over) polished products.

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.

Urban planners have developed many theories of how urban design affects people's experience of real-world cities. This paper considers how this body of work might be applied to the design of virtual environments. The paper presents and compares two pieces of research, each proposing algorithms for automatically enhancing or generating virtual environments and each inspired by a different theory of urban design. The first describes how Kevin Lynch's work on the legibility of cities can be applied to improve the navigability of three dimensional information visualisations. The paper describes the design, construction and experimental evaluation of a system called LEADS which implements some general purpose legibility enhancing algorithms. The second describes how Hillier and Hansen's work on the social logic of space has been applied to the construction of multi-user virtual cities. The paper describes the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a city generation system called The Virtual City Builder (VCB). It then describes simulation experiments with VCB which uncover relationships between different city layouts and opportunities for navigation and social encounter. The paper concludes by comparing both pieces of work and by outlining possibilities for their future integration.

This paper shows how previous research into navigation through urban environments, which has emerged from the discipline of urban planning, can be adapted to enhance the design of information visualizations. The paper draws on Kevin Lynch's seminal work on the legibility of urban landscapes in order to propose a set of general techniques which can be applied to the task of information visualization. It describes a specific instantiation of these techniques called LEADS, a legibility system which post-processes the output of a range of existing visualization systems in order to enhance their legibility. The paper provides four examples of the application of LEADS to different information visualizations. Following this, it discusses experimental work, the conclusions of which provide some tentative support for the likely success of this approach. The outcomes of this work are both a recognition of the important relationship between the disciplines of urban planning and the design of information visualizations as well as more concrete algorithms to be used by the designers of such visualizations.

Navigation in computer generated information spaces may be difficult, resulting in users getting "lost in hyperspace". This work aims to build on research from the area of city planning to try to solve this problem. We introduce the concepts of legibility and cognitive maps and the five features of urban landscape with which they are associated. Following this will be descriptions of techniques and algorithms which we have developed to allow these features to be introduced to three dimensional spaces for information visualisation. Next we describe a specific application of these techniques in the visualisation of the World Wide Web and conclude with a look at future development of the system.

Abstract We present a virtual reality application called VR‐VIBE which is intended to support the co‐operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR‐VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR‐VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co‐operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR‐VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting.

Room metaphors have become increasingly popular as a basis for CSCW systems. The paper describes how such metaphors might be extended to support large scale communication through the introduction of a spatial model for mediating conversations in virtual computer spaces. The model is described in terms of an abstract mathematical framework and the paper then outlines how this might be applied to various kinds of CSCW system. As a next step, the combination of rooms into larger virtual structures is considered and this results in proposals for structuring, navigating and mapping a large virtual Cyberspace for cooperation. Finally, the paper describes a current prototype application and reflects on some of the architectural issues involved in its realisation as a distributed system.