Toward locales: Supporting collaboration with Orbit

The WORLDS project at DSTC, the Cooperative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology, is experimenting with computer-based collaboration support. Our goal is to provide support for the workaday activities of distributed groups. To facilitate this we are developing, in parallel, a theory of collaborative activity (the locales framework) and a series of prototypes to test this theory. In this paper we briefly overview the theory and then describe the evolution of the three versions of our Orbit prototype. The prototypes focus on providing a range of facilities, including shared distributed objects, multiple personalizable views, user-controllable presence and awareness of user activities, and the ability to participate in multiple activities simultaneously, with varying degrees of intensity.