<p>This thesis is about collaborative activities in interactive spaces. These spaces are characterized by having shared, large displays in combination with private displays and software tools that facilitate a fluent sharing of information between people and their resources. The aim is to understand the collaborative activities in interactive spaces in terms of how team members are allowed to contribute to the overall work and what influence the physical qualities of space have on the collaboration. The research questions focus on the ways team members come to contribute to the work, how roles and functions are handled during collaboration, and how the physical qualities of the space influence the collaborative activities. To investigate these issues two empirical studies were conducted. The first study focused on two student teams that carried out conceptual design activities. The second study focused on geographically distributed meetings of an international research network. Data was mainly collected using video recordings, observations and questionnaires. The analyses are primarily based on detailed investigations of video recordings. The results showed in the first study that the large, touch-sensitive displays made it possible for the team members to interact and contribute to the work in several ways, which led to more equalized roles. In the second study the setting was more complex; the use of both video- and audio conferences made it difficult for the team members to overview the situation and to take part in the conversations, and their roles became more accentuated. It was further found that the physical- and the social space were intertwined: they appeared as spaces within spaces. The team members were also in a concrete sense constructing spaces within spaces: they created their own spaces in the common space and they often made transitions between shared and private, focal and peripheral work.</p>

This thesis is about collaborative activities in interactive spaces. These spaces are characterized by having shared, large displays in combination with private displays and software tools that facilitate a fluent sharing of information between people and their resources. The aim is to understand the collaborative activities in interactive spaces in terms of how team members are allowed to contribute to the overall work and what influence the physical qualities of space have on the collaboration. The research questions focus on the ways team members come to contribute to the work, how roles and functions are handled during collaboration, and how the physical qualities of the space influence the collaborative activities. To investigate these issues two empirical studies were conducted. The first study focused on two student teams that carried out conceptual design activities. The second study focused on geographically distributed meetings of an international research network. Data was mainly collected using video recordings, observations and questionnaires. The analyses are primarily based on detailed investigations of video recordings. The results showed in the first study that the large, touch-sensitive displays made it possible for the team members to interact and contribute to the work in several ways, which led to more equalized roles. In the second study the setting was more complex; the use of both video- and audio conferences made it difficult for the team members to overview the situation and to take part in the conversations, and their roles became more accentuated. It was further found that the physical- and the social space were intertwined: they appeared as spaces within spaces. The team members were also in a concrete sense constructing spaces within spaces: they created their own spaces in the common space and they often made transitions between shared and private, focal and peripheral work.

Les Environnements Virtuels Immersifs (EVI) peuvent être utilisés pour amener des utilisateurs, répartis géographiquement ou co-localisés, à partager un même monde virtuel pour collaborer. Si l’on compare aux situations distantes, les utilisateurs d’une immersion co-localisée collaborent aussi dans le monde virtuel, mais a contrario, partagent physiquement un même espace de travail. Cette co-localisation facilite le travail collaboratif en permettant des communications directes et des interactions sans médiation informatique entre les utilisateurs.Avec le développement de l'affichage multi-utilisateur et de la technologie de tracking, les dispositifs immersifs classiques basés sur la rétroprojection (ex. CAVE) peuvent offrir maintenant l'immersion pour plusieurs utilisateurs co-localisés en affichant différentes vues stéréoscopiques sans distorsion visuelle pour chacun d’eux. Dans ce contexte, la coexistence de l'information du monde virtuel et réel, en particulier lorsque les utilisateurs ne partagent pas un référentiel spatial commun, offre aux utilisateurs une nouvelle expérience perceptive et cognitive. Dans cette thèse nous nous sommes intéressés à la façon dont les utilisateurs se perçoivent et communiquent entre eux pour atteindre un contexte commun pour la collaboration, et aux moyens permettant d’élargir des scénarios collaboratifs déjà pris en charge dans ce type de dispositifs, basés sur des techniques de contrôle plus flexible des points de vue des utilisateurs. Cette thèse de doctorat traite donc principalement des problèmes perceptifs et de cohabitation que nous avons identifiés dans l’objectif d’assurer la sécurité et l’efficacité des collaborations co-localisées dans les environnements virtuels immersifs. Tout d'abord, nous avons mené une étude de cas pour examiner comment les conflits perceptifs modifieraient la communication entre les utilisateurs et leur performance. Deuxièmement, nous avons conçu et évalué des paradigmes de navigation appropriés pour permettre la navigation virtuelle individuelle tout en résolvant les problèmes de la cohabitation dans un espace de travail partagé physiquement limité. Enfin, sur la base des résultats de ces travaux, nous avons proposé un modèle dynamique générique qui intègre des contraintes de l'espace de travail physique et aussi ceux du monde virtuel pour gérer la collaboration co-localisée dans les systèmes immersifs multi-utilisateurs. / Immersive virtual environment can be used to bring both geographically distributed and co-located users to the same virtual place for collaboration. Compared to remote situations, co-located users collaborate in the same virtual world on top of a shared physical workspace. This collocation allows direct user communication and interaction without computer mediation which facilitates collaborative work. With the development of multi-user display and tracking technology, classical projection-based immersive setups (e.g. CAVE) can now support group immersion for co-located users by offering individual stereoscopic views without visual distortion. In this context, the coexistence of information from the virtual and real world, especially when users do not share a common spatial reference frame, provides users with a new kind of perceptual and cognitive experience. We are interested in how users perceive and communicate with each other to achieve a shared context for collaboration, and how we can broaden supported collaborative scenarios with more flexible viewpoint control.This PhD thesis mainly addresses perceptual and cohabitation issues that we identified in the aim of supporting safe and efficient co-located collaboration in immersive virtual environment. First, we conducted a case study to examine how perceptual conflicts would alter user communication and task performance. Second, we concentrated on the design and evaluation of appropriate navigation paradigms to allow individual virtual navigation while solving cohabitation problems in a shared limited physical workspace. At last, based on the results of previous studies, we designed a generic dynamic navigation model which integrates constrains from the physical workspace and also the virtual world to enable co-located collaboration in multi-user immersive systems.

The preliminary design phase occurs near the launch of an engineering project, normally after an initial requirements gathering phase. Through a series of meetingswhich gathers the key actors of a project, effective preliminary design involves discussion and decision-making punctuated by group creativity techniques. These activities are designed to explore the potential solutions of the problem, such asbrainstorming or causal analysis, or to address the project itself, such as collaborative project planning. Such activities are usually conducted in traditional meeting rooms with pen and paper media, which requires significant time and effort to prepare, perform, and later render into a digitally exploitable format. These processes have resisted previous attempts of computer-supported solutions, because any additional instruments risk obstructing the natural collaboration and workflow that make these activities so beneficial. Over the past decade, technologies such as interactive table tops, interactive wall displays, speech recognition software, 3D motion sensing cameras, and handheld tablets and smartphones have experienced significant advances in maturity. Theirform factors resemble the physical configuration of traditional pen-and-paper environments,while their "natural" input devices (based on multi-touch, gestures, voice, tangibles, etc.) allow them to leverage a user's pre-existing verbal, spatial,social, motor and cognitive skills. Researchers hypothesize that having these devices working in concert inside interactive spaces could augment collaboration forco-located (i.e. physically present) groups of users.There currently exist several interactive spaces in the literature, illustrating awide range of potential hardware configurations and interaction techniques. The goal of this thesis is first to explore what qualities these interactive spaces should exhibit in their interaction design, particularly with regard to preliminary designactivities, and second, to investigate how their heterogeneous and distributed computing devices can be unified into a flexible and extensible distributed computing architecture. The first main contribution of this thesis is an extensive presentation of an interactive space, which at its core uses a configuration not yet fully explored inprevious literature : a large multitouch table top and a large multitouch interactive Abstract board display. The design of this interactive space is driven by observations o fgroups engaged in preliminary design activities in traditional environments and a literature review aimed at extracting user-centered design guide lines. Special consideration is given to the user interface as it extends across multiple shared displays, and maintains a separation of concerns regarding personal and group work. Finally, evaluations using groups of five and six users show that using such an interactive space, coupled with our proposed multi-display interaction techniques, leads to a more effective construction of the digital artifacts used in preliminary design.The second main contribution of this thesis is a multi-agent infrastructure forthe distributed computing environment which effectively accommodates a widerange of platforms and devices in concerted interaction. By using agent-oriented programming and by establishing a common content language for messaging, the infrastructure is especially tolerant of network faults and suitable for rapid prototyping of heterogeneous devices in the interactive space.

La phase de conception préliminaire est déterminante lors de la réalisation d’un projet industriel. Elle exploite généralement des outils méthodologiques tels que le brainstorming, l’analyse causale et le chronogramme, qui permettent la collaboration entre des participants aux compétences et aux approches différentes. Ces activités se déroulent dans des salles de réunions traditionnelles, autour d'une table ou devant un tableau blanc, avec l’aide de nombreux papiers et Post-it, ce qui rend la préparation, l’exécution, et l’exploitation de ce processus particulièrement difficile. Jusqu’à présent, cette phase de conception préliminaire a résisté à la numérisation, notamment parce que l’addition d’un dispositif informatique au sein de ces activités perturbe la communication et la collaboration naturelles entre participants. Au cours des dix dernières années, de nombreuses avancées technologiques ont été réalisées en ce qui concerne les dispositifs numériques tels que les tables et les tableaux interactifs, les smartphones et les tablettes tactiles. La similarité des configurations physiques de ces dispositifs avec les dispositifs plus traditionnels permet d’exploiter les capacités préexistantes des utilisateurs (l’habileté motrice, le raisonnement spatial, le langage parlé, etc.). Les chercheurs se basent sur l’hypothèse que ces nouveaux dispositifs, travaillant de concert au sein d’espaces interactifs, pourront augmenter la collaboration co-localisée pour les équipes de conception préliminaire. L’objectif de cette thèse est, d’une part, d’étudier la conception d’un espace interactif pour la collaboration co-localisée durant la phase de conception préliminaire, et d’autre part, de proposer une architecture permettant de réunir les dispositifs hétérogènes et distribués composant cet espace.La première contribution consiste en une présentation détaillée d’un espace interactif utilisant une configuration physique encore peu exploitée dans la littérature scientifique : une table et un tableau multi-tactiles de grandes dimensions. La conception de cet espace interactif a été basée sur des observations d’utilisateurs dans un contexte de conception préliminaire traditionnel et sur une revue de la littérature visant à identifier des principes de conception. Lors de la conception de cet espace, une attention particulière a été portée à l’interface utilisateur qui s’étend sur des écrans partagés et qui maintient une séparation entre les activités d’un participant et les activités d’une équipe. Enfin, les évaluations, réalisées avec des groupes de cinq à six participants, démontrent une amélioration dans l’exploitation des outils méthodologiques sur supports numériques par rapport à une utilisation traditionnelle lors de la conception préliminaire.La conception d’une infrastructure distribuée basée sur un système multi-agents constitue la deuxième contribution de cette thèse. Cette infrastructure parvient à rassembler de nombreuses plateformes et des dispositifs hétérogènes. Elle représente une solution intéressante pour les espaces interactifs, en particulier parce qu’elle tolère particulièrement bien la défaillance de réseau et permet un prototypage rapide des dispositifs. / The preliminary design phase occurs near the launch of an engineering project, normally after an initial requirements gathering phase. Through a series of meetingswhich gathers the key actors of a project, effective preliminary design involves discussion and decision-making punctuated by group creativity techniques. These activities are designed to explore the potential solutions of the problem, such asbrainstorming or causal analysis, or to address the project itself, such as collaborative project planning. Such activities are usually conducted in traditional meeting rooms with pen and paper media, which requires significant time and effort to prepare, perform, and later render into a digitally exploitable format. These processes have resisted previous attempts of computer-supported solutions, because any additional instruments risk obstructing the natural collaboration and workflow that make these activities so beneficial. Over the past decade, technologies such as interactive table tops, interactive wall displays, speech recognition software, 3D motion sensing cameras, and handheld tablets and smartphones have experienced significant advances in maturity. Theirform factors resemble the physical configuration of traditional pen-and-paper environments,while their “natural” input devices (based on multi-touch, gestures, voice, tangibles, etc.) allow them to leverage a user’s pre-existing verbal, spatial,social, motor and cognitive skills. Researchers hypothesize that having these devices working in concert inside interactive spaces could augment collaboration forco-located (i.e. physically present) groups of users.There currently exist several interactive spaces in the literature, illustrating awide range of potential hardware configurations and interaction techniques. The goal of this thesis is first to explore what qualities these interactive spaces should exhibit in their interaction design, particularly with regard to preliminary designactivities, and second, to investigate how their heterogeneous and distributed computing devices can be unified into a flexible and extensible distributed computing architecture. The first main contribution of this thesis is an extensive presentation of an interactive space, which at its core uses a configuration not yet fully explored inprevious literature : a large multitouch table top and a large multitouch interactive Abstract board display. The design of this interactive space is driven by observations o fgroups engaged in preliminary design activities in traditional environments and a literature review aimed at extracting user-centered design guide lines. Special consideration is given to the user interface as it extends across multiple shared displays, and maintains a separation of concerns regarding personal and group work. Finally, evaluations using groups of five and six users show that using such an interactive space, coupled with our proposed multi-display interaction techniques, leads to a more effective construction of the digital artifacts used in preliminary design.The second main contribution of this thesis is a multi-agent infrastructure forthe distributed computing environment which effectively accommodates a widerange of platforms and devices in concerted interaction. By using agent-oriented programming and by establishing a common content language for messaging, the infrastructure is especially tolerant of network faults and suitable for rapid prototyping of heterogeneous devices in the interactive space.