Spatial Event Map for Secure Multi-User Collaboration
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Solution Overview
Problem
Digital collaboration systems face challenges in coordinating multiple users, ensuring security, and managing concurrency across distributed networks, particularly in large-scale displays where users interact with the same workspace data simultaneously, leading to issues with flexibility and confidentiality.
Innovation Solution
A collaboration system utilizing a spatial event map that tracks interactions in a virtual, unbounded workspace, allowing multiple users to access and share data in real-time while maintaining security through server-side and client-side network nodes, and classifying events as history or ephemeral to manage data persistence and concurrency.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If multiple users interact with the same workspace data simultaneously on distributed displays, then real-time collaboration and flexibility of expression are improved, but security and concurrency control deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the collaboration space into multiple isolated drawing regions, each assigned to specific users. This allows users to express ideas freely within their own region while the system maintains security by preventing unauthorized access to other users' regions. The spatial event map further segments event tracking by user and region, enabling concurrent operations without conflict.
Solution Approach 2:
The spatial event map acts as an intermediary layer between users and the workspace data. It captures, logs, and manages all user interactions with graphical targets, providing a centralized mechanism to coordinate concurrent operations across distributed displays while maintaining data integrity and security permissions.
2Ease of operation
If distributed displays are made accessible to multiple users at different locations, then collaboration accessibility is improved, but concurrency control and data consistency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The spatial event map provides continuous feedback about the state of graphical targets and user interactions. By logging all events with timestamps and user identifiers, the system can detect conflicts, manage concurrency, and maintain data consistency across distributed displays, transforming the complexity of concurrent access into a manageable feedback-driven process.
3Productivity
If a single large display is shared by multiple users, then real-time interaction is improved, but user flexibility and coordination deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The system divides the large display surface into multiple drawing regions, each assigned to specific users. This segmentation maintains the benefits of real-time interaction on a large surface while improving coordination by clearly defining user boundaries and responsibilities within the shared space.
Data Source
AI summary
A spatial event map system including server-side data processor that maintains a spatial event map which locates events in a workspace. The spatial event map includes a log of events, entries in the log having a location of a graphical target of the event in the workspace and a time. The system includes logic to send messages including an event, a location of a graphical target of the event in the workspace and a time, to client-side network nodes; and to receive messages identifying events that create or modify a graphical target, and to add corresponding entries to the log of events. The events can include history events that are sent to the other client-side network nodes, and added to the log for the corresponding history events, and ephemeral events that are sent to other client-side network nodes without adding corresponding entries in the log.