An Environment for Conducting and Analysing Graphical Communication Experiments
Patrick G. T. Healey4
, Nik Swoboda5
and James King4 
| (4) |
Queen Mary, University of London, E1 4NS London, UK |
| (5) |
DEIMOS Space S.L., Sector Oficios 34, Tres Cantos, 28760 Madrid, Spain |
Abstract
Drawing is a basic but often overlooked mode of human communication. This paper presents a shared whiteboard environment,
written in Java, that was designed to be used to collect and analyse data gathered in interactive graphical communication
experiments. Users of the software are presented with a ‘virtual’ whiteboard that is connected to another user’s whiteboard
to create a shared graphical communication space. In addition to logging all drawing activity between the pair and providing
tools for the analysis of this data, the software can manipulate the layout and the degree of interactivity of the drawing
being exchanged. The program can also be used to setup and manage multiple simultaneous shared whiteboard connections and
subject groupings.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the ERSC/EPSRC PACCIT initiative through the grant MAGIC: Multimodality and Graphics
in Interactive Communication (L328253003). The support of ATR Media Information Science Laboratories has also been critical
to the development of work in this paper.
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