ACE members: Mårten Stenius - Leader of the ACE group

The goal of the ACE group is to propose and research different areas of application for collaborative environments. This involves activities ranging from participation in long-term research programmes and the development of general usage frameworks to pure applied case studies within specific domain areas.

Current projects within the ACE group focus on:

• Electronic landscapes, where findings in shared virtual environments are directly applied to the wide-scope international networks of today and tomorrow, to produce common frameworks for virtual navigation and participation between environments in a very heterogeneous set of systems.
• Shared, distributed meeting rooms, using mixed and virtual reality techniques.
• Distributed engingeering, where shared virtual reality and high-quality video conferencing is combined with commercial CAD systems in a heterogeneous setting using high-bandwith networks.
• Interactive television, where the emerging globally accessible computer networks are viewed as an embryo for the television of the future,and todays centrally controlled, one-way television will be replaced with highly interactive and personal transmission channels.
  

Among the areas of interest and future projects are also medical applications, entertainment and presentation environments, database visualisations in general, usage evaluations, and different forms of domestic environments.

In general, the activity of the ACE group should be guided by taking the results from work on infrastructures and interaction methods, and as freely as possible:

• Apply these results to current domain areas in the society as a whole.
• Actively drive the evolution towards and within new areas emerging from the new techniques.
  

The focus on an open set of application areas makes interdiciplinarity a key issue in the ACE group. This must be actively pursued, both within the recruiting of personnel and the external liasions.

The work within the ACE will continously be closely tied to the work within the other groups of the ICE Lab, by a bi-directional flow of ideas, requirements, and so on - and more specifially by sharing resources, projects, and techniques.