Collaboration System Viewport Markers for Virtual Workspace Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Collaboration systems with large, unbounded virtual workspaces face challenges in efficient navigation, locating graphical objects, and maintaining content organization, leading to difficulties in viewing intended content and following ordered sequences of graphical objects.
Innovation Solution
A system that stores and tracks viewports within a collaborative workspace, allowing users to share and access displayable areas as intended by the creator, using network nodes to render and update client canvases with metadata, including location, dimensions, and access lists, to facilitate efficient traversal and organization across multiple devices.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If users place graphical objects anywhere in the unbounded workspace, then flexibility and adaptability are improved, but navigation difficulty and time to locate objects increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-generates thumbnail images of graphical objects at their various locations in the workspace before the user needs to search for them. These thumbnails are cached and made immediately available for display in the navigation interface, allowing users to quickly scan and locate objects without manually navigating through the entire workspace.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces a navigation interface as an intermediary between the user and the graphical objects in the workspace. This interface displays thumbnails of graphical objects at different locations, serving as a mediator that allows users to efficiently search for and navigate to specific objects without directly traversing the entire workspace.
2Adaptability or versatility
If the workspace is made essentially unbounded to allow free placement, then adaptability is improved, but navigation and traversal efficiency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
Thumbnail images of graphical objects are pre-generated and cached at various workspace locations before navigation is needed. This preliminary preparation allows the navigation interface to immediately display available objects and their locations, enabling efficient traversal without compromising the unbounded nature of the workspace.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates thumbnail copies of graphical objects that represent their appearance and location in the workspace. These thumbnails are displayed in the navigation interface, providing a simplified representation that allows users to efficiently search for and navigate to full-sized objects without directly interacting with the entire workspace.
3Device complexity
If manual panning and zooming is required to traverse the workspace, then device complexity is reduced, but ease of operation deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
A navigation interface is introduced as an intermediary that displays thumbnails of graphical objects at various workspace locations. Users interact with this simplified interface to select and navigate to objects of interest, rather than manually panning and zooming through the entire workspace, significantly improving ease of operation.
Solution Approach 2:
The navigation interface displays thumbnail copies of graphical objects that represent their appearance and location. Users can scan these thumbnails and quickly jump to specific objects, replacing the need for manual traversal while maintaining system simplicity.
4Adaptability or versatility
If multiple viewports are shared across network nodes, then collaboration capability is improved, but data synchronization complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts and caches essential viewport information (such as thumbnail images, location coordinates, and metadata) from the full workspace data. This extracted information is stored locally at each network node, allowing viewports to be shared and synchronized across the network without requiring complex real-time synchronization of the entire workspace dataset.
Data Source
AI summary
A network node of a collaboration system is provided to establish communication with other network nodes. The network node comprises a display having a physical display space. The network node can store collaboration data and render on the local client screen space a local client canvas having locations in the virtual workspace. The network node includes logic to provide a user interface to display a list of markers representing predefined canvases in both the virtual workspace and another virtual workspace. The predefined canvases defining (i) respective areas in the virtual workspace having a location and (ii) an area in the other virtual workspace having a location. The network node includes logic to respond to an input indicating a selected marker from the list of displayed markers to update the location of the local client canvas to match the location of the predefined canvas represented by the selected marker.