The challenges of ambient collaboration

Collaborative capabilities are a hallmark of a new generation of networked applications. While traditional collaboration puts the computer in the foreground to help users interface through personal computing portholes, ambient collaboration reverses this paradigm by placing the machine in the background and enabling users to synergistically share a workspace with focus on mutual presence and tasks rather than tools. Although various ambient collaborative systems have been deployed in recent years, the field itself lacks a conceptual framework, in particular in contrast with legacy collaborative technologies. We introduce a simple systematics and roadmap for ambient collaboration to identify opportunities and challenges unique to this class of computing.