Collaboration in the age of augmented reality

Groupware and socialware focus on human interaction and usually provide document sharing and team management support. During the last few years, however, people and documents have been joined by Internet-connected electronic devices that produce and consume data and allow humans to observe and control real-world processes. This co-presence of humans, data, and electronic devices on Internet constitutes a virtual universe with a new dimension, one that parallels the physical world and merges with it seamlessly. Unfortunately, no applications currently support this new reality while providing sophisticated groupware and socialware features at the same time. We propose a list of properties of an ideal environment supporting human, document, and device interaction, and describe a design that would satisfy these requirements.