Collaborating in context: immersive visualisation environments

As visualizations of large systems get more and more complex, larger collaborative spaces are required so that a team of designers may work together while visualising their system. This paper describes the outfitting of a room to turn it into an immersive visualisation environment. The environment consists of large display areas, onto which are projected high resolution visualisations of software systems. Specialised hardware allows the environment to support multiple concurrent users, who are encouraged to collaborate on team-based tasks and interact with the environment using novel interaction metaphors. We will describe applications that demonstrate the efficacy of this new approach to collaboration.