The issue I see is that Shared Space implies
- a uniform physical architectural metaphor - that each participant's experience (or at least the mental model of it) is identical.
- a uniform order of events - that each participant's experience of events in the space is (ideally at least) identical.
- a coherent experience of time - that when an event occurs in the shared space, it occurs (again, ideally) at a single, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC or GMT) that can be identified by all participants.
- one user's concept of the space, not just the medium, may be very different from another's.
- the order of events may be relativistic.
- the relationship of time in the application may be non-linear, non-monotonic, and not connected to UTC.
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So I was reading the project casablanca paper and I had this nagging doubt about the usefulness of the room link idea. Room link was proposed as basically a high quality speaker phone link between rooms in separate households.
I kept thinking "this sounds great" but couldn't figure out what was the big hurdle and then it hit me. It's about the multiplier effect of all these communication links.
Lets say the only person you want to link with his your best friend across town. Sure great lets link kitchens and we can talk whenever we are cooking or doing stuff. And we can keep up on what each other are up to even when we are not really talking. Great until your other friends want to link in as well. Now you have 4 kitchens linked? I don't know. But it reminded me of the connections concept discussed in the probabilities book I'm reading. They use that old example where if you have 23 or more people, then you are more than 50% likely to have at least one pair with the same birthday. This doesn't seem right but because person 1 has 22 chances to pair and person two has 21 chances, etc, you end up getting a huge number of chance to match up the 1/365. Anyway, this can be extended to communication in the sense that if you have parents, in laws, some siblings, and a few friends, then you have some really major communication links to keep up and running. So having some sort of always on connection is probably not helpful for most situations. (I'm sure there are plenty of times when this would be helpful, but just not in the widespread user adoption sense.)
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