Hand, C. "Creating hypermedia documents by doing: an alternative to
authoring". IEE Colloquium on The Authoring and Application of
Hypermedia-Based User Interfaces, London, 14th November 1995.
Digest No: 95/202. pp3/1-3/3.
© 1995 The Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Chris Hand
This paper describes how we provided a way for transient users of a "virtual trade exhibition" on the Internet to create hypertext documents by acting rather than writing. TaTTOO'95 On-line (Hand and Skipper, 1995) was an Internet-based sister event to the international TaTTOO'95 conference held at De Montfort University, Leicester in January 1995. The on-line events, including a Panel Session and a Virtual Trade Exhibition, were implemented using two key technologies: the World-Wide Web (WWW) and MOO.
MOO (MUD[**], Object-Oriented) is a multi-user, text-based virtual world. Users interact with each other by typing text commands in real time and reading the responses of other users from the screen (Curtis and Nichols, 1994). MOO is more than a simple "chat" system such as IRC for a number of reasons. Firstly, users are situated in a virtual space, whereas IRC and similar systems disembody their users in the same way that the telephone does. Secondly, this virtual space may be constructed and customised by the users who inhabit it - the world is built by creating software objects for locations, people, books and so on. In this way no two MOOs are alike, each developing its own identity and structure according to the needs and wishes of its inhabitants.
Since MOO is text-based we used the World-Wide Web to present the on-line events with additional information such as graphics. The two interfaces, MOO and Web, were intended to co-exist and to provide different ways to experience the events.
Our experiences with using a MOO for various research projects and on-line meetings led us to consider the similarities between this kind of spatially-organised virtual world and the world of hypertext documents (roughly speaking, cyberspace versus hyperspace). In the MOO, users have a "home" which they customise by changing its description (as read by other users), creating new objects and so on. This is similar to the phenomenon of the "home page" document as found on the Web, in which users describe themselves, their research or personal interests as well as including links to other documents to which they refer regularly or which they find important. Authoring a home-page requires knowledge of the Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML), which presents a barrier to many new users who often make do with simply adding document locations to a "hot-list" or set of bookmarks instead. This is one problem we wanted to address.
Organising concepts spatially is a useful way of harnessing our natural capabilities to understand complex relationships, although the introduction of space as an organising principle may only be appropriate for certain tasks (Shum, 1990; Dieberger and Tromp, 1993). Since the metaphor of an exhibition, with stands, sales staff, promotional literature etc. was likely to be familiar to delegates, we wanted to map this virtual space onto a hypertext space on the web, thereby giving a familiar spatial structure to the hypertext as well as allowing delegates to choose the way in which they visited the exhibition.
The aims of the virtual trade exhibition may be summarised as follows:
The virtual trade exhibition was implemented as a room in the MOO - the "exhibition hall". Around this were clustered other rooms which appeared to users as stands in the exhibition hall. The stands could be manned by personnel from the exhibiting organisations (who logged in remotely), which allowed them to talk to delegates and to distribute business cards and product leaflets. Each exhibitor was also provided with a software robot to manage the stand in their absence, since time-zone differences made it difficult for stands to be continuously manned in the presence of delegates. These simple robots were capable of responding to simple natural-language queries concerning products, giving out leaflets or other objects where appropriate.
Delegates were given the ability to create Web pages of their own, including links to objects such as business cards and product leaflets, regardless of whether they had any knowledge of HTML. This was achieved by mapping the delegate's representation in the MOO on to an HTML document. The Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) support we added allowed any object in the MOO to be viewed using a web browser (by giving a URL specifying the address and port of the MOO server along with the object's number), with the additional possibility of viewing other media not supported by MOO, such as graphics. When using a Web browser to view a delegate's personal space (ie. the MOO object which represents them), any objects held by the delegate would appear automatically in hypertext format. Thus delegates created their own personal information space by moving around in the MOO and collecting objects which were important to them. This is similar to the familiar real-world exhibition, during which visitors move from stand to stand collecting product literature or business cards in a carrier bag, although without the drudgery.
In fact we initially implemented the personal web page as a "carrier bag" object, with the intention that delegates would wander around the MOO and place objects of interest in the bag as a way of making them appear on the Web. Since users already had a Web page representing themselves, as did all MOO objects, this meant that accessing any user's carrier bag via the Web was a two-stage process: first access the person object/page, see the carrier bag in the list of things they are carrying, and then access the bag. At the time we considered it expedient to remove this extra level of indirection and so we did away with it, although one exhibitor who was familiar with MOO programming created his own carrier bags, filled with promotional items, to give out to delegates. It would perhaps be interesting to use the bags, or something similar, as a way of allowing users to have more control over the structure of their information spaces.
Although experienced users might have created their personal web pages using an authoring tool instead of using the techniques described above, we considered it more important that the delegates should perform their primary activity (information collection) unhindered by the requirement to think about authoring, allowing them to remain "immersed" in the virtual environment.
The MOO is an inherently multi-user environment, so adding support for a protocol such as HTTP provides a useful basis for experiments in collaborative hypermedia (Meyer, Blair and Hader, 1994). Since delegates of TaTTOO'95 on-line were able to discuss products and exhibitors among themselves or with exhibition staff, it became possible for one user to inform or influence another in the creation of their information space. During the course of the on-line events we found that users would give items of interest to each other, or even spontaneously act as distributors, wandering round the exhibition handing out leaflets to other delegates. Another form of co-operation, which we have also noticed in our other virtual conferences, was collaborative retrieval of resources from the Web. This ability for one user to assist another inside the virtual world is very useful and important when inexperienced users are introduced to the system.
There is a proverb which claims that "Deeds are fruits, words are but leaves". Although this will only apply to certain kinds of activity, we consider that mapping a virtual world onto a hypertext, in order to allow action in that world to create the document as a by-product, provides an interesting perspective which merits further exploration. In particular this approach has two advantages:
It may be that placing collaborating users in a virtual space enhances their ability to work together. Similar to the chat systems mentioned above, many collaborative systems disembody their users, or provide a minimal embodiment such as a cursor or simple hand. Placing the emphasis on multi-user action in a space rather than disembodied multi-user writing may be one way of increasing engagement in collaborative authoring systems.
One problem we discovered was in using the MOO and WWW interfaces simultaneously. Since the two clients (telnet and Netscape for example) operated independently, it was common for them to display different parts of the MOO. It would have been useful to implement a mechanism to keep them synchronised, although methods for remote-controlling Web browsers are unfortunately not yet standardised.
In the future it may be worth exploring the use of a hybrid client, which allows hypertext browsing as well as text-based interaction via the MOO. This may be extended to a mixed-mode approach which combines two generations of user interface: command-line (or conversation-based) and graphical user interface (or direct manipulation). Exploring the possibilities for hybrid MOO/hypertext clients might provide some insight into a new kind of interface which goes beyond these two traditional approaches.
The author is indebted to Alister Lewis-Bowen of IBM (Portsmouth), for his time and effort in looking after the server machine during the on-line events. Thanks also to Mark Skipper, who did much of the work relating to TaTTOO on-line, and to Alan O'Callaghan, Ray Farmer, Prof. Paul Luker and the late Prof. Neil Wiseman for their help and encouragement in this work.
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Footnote:
** MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon (or sometimes Multi-User Dimension) -
the original MUDs were multi-user adventure games based on Dungeons and Dragons.