IdeaWall

With the recent advances in computer-supported cooperative work systems and increasing popularization of speech-based interfaces, groupware attempting to emulate a knowledgeable participant in a collaborative environment is bound to become a reality in the near future. In this paper, we present IdeaWall, a real-time system that continuously extracts essential information from a verbal discussion and augments that information with web-search materials. IdeaWall provides combinatorial visual stimuli to the participants to facilitate their creative process. We develop three cognitive strategies, from which a prototype application with three display modes was designed, implemented, and evaluated. The results of the user study with twelve groups show that IdeaWall effectively presents visual cues to facilitate verbal creative collaboration for idea generation and sets the stage for future research on intelligent systems that assist collaborative work.