Collaborative Distributed Cognition Using A Seamless Desktop Infrastructure

Inexpensive displays make large, tiled displays attractive for visual analysis and collaborative investigation. Especially in multi-user environments, the increased space allows to better organize the findings and results and, therefore, helps to improve collaboration. One important requirement is that all users can navigate seamlessly on the whole display space, while employing the standard software they are familiar with. In this paper, we present a seamless desktop infrastructure for distributed cognition and collaboration. Our infrastructure only uses standard hardware and software. By choosing a minimally invasive, web-centric approach, we can integrate existing web applications and visual analysis software with little or no effort into our system. We can even leverage existing synchronization mechanisms built into many web applications today.