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From: yamo@nas.nasa.gov (Michael Yamasaki)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: Re: Basic Groupware/CSCW Questions
Message-ID: <1991Mar22.195420.9886@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 22 Mar 91 19:54:20 GMT
References: <9103180701.aa04734@ICS.UCI.EDU>
Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov
Organization: NAS Program, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Lines: 46


Greetings.  I've new to this news group, but have followed the 
recent conversation about the role of social theory in CSCW/groupware.  
My background is probably a bit different from most of the participants 
in this news group and as such may see things from a slightly different
angle.  I am a researcher in scientific visualization for NASA and one 
of my current interests is the use of CSCW in scientific visualization.
The visualization area is primarily computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
There is a high degree of collaboration among CFD scientists and 
frequently scientists from geographically remote locations. The 
visualization process makes use of high performance graphics workstations
and frequently supercomputers.  

Visualization techniques which utilize the advanced capabilities of 
high-performance graphics workstations are for the most part not
transportable beyond the workstation without some loss of informational
content: resolution degradation, color degradation, lack of motion or
animation, or lack of interactivity.  This lack of transportability 
makes it difficult to communicate the results of the visualization 
process to collaborators.  Hence, techniques to share the vis process
or at least present simultaneous, identical images is important for 
collaboration in CFD research. 

It seems as though this is a slightly different paradigm than what I 
read in the few groupware/CSCW papers that I've read.  The purpose is
more on the level of basic communication, sort of a very high tech
fax, than for some higher level of social interaction.  The basis for
exchange is something like:

       "Let me show you something that I found in the data..."
       "Oh, that's interesting, did you notice this feature over here..."
       "Yes, that's related to this thing over here..."
       etc.

It's more an exploration of an unknown shared environment rather than the
building of a shared environment, if that makes any sense. Consequently, 
a level of agreement between the participants required for building a 
shared environment is not necessary.  The "common task (or goal)" in this
instance is the somewhat abstract understanding of the data being 
visualized and is detached, really, from the actual shared environment. 


                                       -Yamo-
                                  yamo@nas.nasa.gov
                               yamo@wk209.nas.nasa.gov
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