Where Is My Onespace?

Last week I spent two days with student teams competing in the Imagine Cup competition. This was my third edition of Imagine Cup I participated as a judge. As always it was so very refreshing to meet the unconfined creativity of the competing teams. But having said that I missed something of a breakthrough. Something blowing the mind, something spectacular in concept. That is why I keep on remembering the inPUT team from the 2007 Imagine Cup. They had something Steve Jobs would love to incorporate in the next release of MacOS. Or something Vista should have built-in to answer the question of what it brings to the end user.

The application has been called onespace. The description on the team's web page does not exactly tell the essence.

onespace is a powerful system designed for easier Communication, Collaboration and Creative Problem Solving. It enables people independently on their location and nation to cooperate as if they were sitting next to each other. onespace gives you ability to share ideas, problems among your friends in more natural way. You can easily learn and work on a same projects together

Well... yes... yet another groupware you would say. And while the concept of team collaboration itself is not new or groundbreaking, to me groundbreaking has been the use of GUI on the computer desktop. Desktop is just this - a desktop. You keep many things there. Shortcuts to various applications, folders and files you work on. It is set to reflect your physical desktop. With various items placed on it. So now how do you work in a group. A physical group for starters. Sitting in one room. There are usually a few people with their desks close to each other. You talk to them, you chat together and very often you pass on some documents or physically look together at one screen. Most often you have two - three neighbors with their desks situated close to yours. One on your left side, one on your right and one in front of you. When you share a physical item (like a printed document) with your right neighbor, you take it with your hand and you place it on your neighbor's desk.

And what the onespace does is it brings this concept of ease of sharing to the virtual desktop, or the one on your screen. The desktop has four edges. The bottom edge is usually occupied by a strip showing frequently used applications and running programs. The other three edges are not used at all. In onespace however, the three edges are virtually connected with corresponding edges of your coworkers desktops. So your right edge becomes a left edge of your "right" team member. Like your desktops were close to each other. You can take any item from your desktop (using a mouse of course) and drag it over the edge to the other desktop. It can be a file. Like a Word document. Click on it, while holding the mouse button down, move it to the edge of your screen and it automagically appears on the corresponding desktop of your neighbor. And it can be an open application window, like an Excel spreadsheet running in a window. This window too can be dragged over the edge of the desktop to another desktop associated with it.

To me this concept was and still is mind-blowing. Of course computer desktops and team members do not have to be in physical proximity. There is no difference now between LAN (Local Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network). The right edge of my desktop may be attached to the left edge of somebody in Australia. My screen has built-in camera and microphone, so we hear each other, but so far to share a window or a file I had to attach them to emails or do some other old - fashioned actions. The GUI simply has not caught up with the connectivity yet. In the all - connected world I wish I had a list of my friends and coworkers popping out of the edge of the screen. From that list I would choose ad-hoc who is currently "attached" to my left, right or top edge of the screen. And work with as we were sitting side by side. Ain't the connected world all about it?