The Kansas Project

A Vast, 2D Space for Realtime Collaboration

The Interactive Collaborative Systems group has been investigating the feasibility and usability issues of a network-based virtual space. The group's emphasis has been on supporting distance learning, but the system has proven itself as a general realtime collaboration kit, and includes support for desktop video and audio links.

Kansas allows several users to move about in an essentially unbounded 2D space. Moving together and apart in Kansas makes and breaks audio connections among users so a group can easily divide into subgroups for discussions or independent work. Users each have a small, local, rectangular window in which they can see their local portion of Kansas, which may contain simulations, documents, tools or other applications. Users can scroll their viewpoints across the large Kansas surface, causing their rectangles to overlap in order to collaborate, or can move away from others to work alone. 

A central principle of Kansas is WYSIWYTIS: What You See Is What You Think I See. Because each user's video image, desktop and mouse is visible to all users, collaboration is possible because participants can work together and guage each other's actions and reactions. A small radar screen enables users to track all activity in the virtual world.

Kansas users can be anywhere in the physical world, although low bandwidth connections limit its effectiveness. For audio and video links, a higher performance network connection is required, though without audio and video, the system generally works well for, say, a small group within the western portion of North America.

Below we see 3 users with audio and video links working in Kansas. Each user has a mouse cursor, and can grab and manipulate any object on the screen. The user at right is working by himself, in this case to program up a relativistic particle launcher application. Because the audio drops off with distance, he is not too distracted by the conversation of the collaborating pair to the left.

Kansas is written in itself - it is essentially a souped-up version of the object oriented Self programming environment, so anything can be modified arbitrarily while the system is running (including things like arithmetic for adding integers!)

The system without audio and video is freely available as the shared world programming environment for the Self language. The Kansas server runs only on a Sun^® SPARCStation^TM computer, although participants without audio or video can use any machine running an X window system.