Team WorkstationHiroshi Ishii and Kazuho Arita (NTT Human Interface Laboratories) / 1990

Team Workstation

TeamWorkStation was designed to provide seamless realtime shared drawing space
for geographically distributed group. The key design idea of TeamWorkStation is
a “translucent overlay” of individual workspace video images.

TeamWorkStation-1 (TWS-1) combines two or more translucent live-video images of
computer screens or physical desktop surfaces using a video synthesis technique.
Translucent overlay allows users to combine individual workspaces and to point
to and draw on the overlaid images simultaneously. We chose video as the basic
medium of TWS because it is the most powerful for fusing presentations of a variety
of traditionally incompatible visual media such as papers and digital documents.

TeamWorkStation-2 (TWS-2) was designed to provide a shared workspace over narrowband
ISDN (N-ISDN) Basic Rate Interface (2B+D) and the Primary Rate Interface (H1/D)
using the CCITT H.261 standard of moving picture transmission.

This project was conducted when Ishii was working for NTT Human Interface Laboratories,
Japan.



Papers

TeamWorkStation full paper published
in CACM ‘94

TeamWorkStation full paper published in ECSCW ‘93

TeamWorkStation full paper published in CACM
‘91

TeamWorkStation full paper presented at CSCW ‘90

Videos

High
Resolution MPEG [352x240]

Low
Resolution MPEG [240x160]

High Resolution RealVideo
[360x240]

Low Resolution RealVideo
[240x160]