Link: BPMRedux Minority Report

Theo Priestly has a great article here about Minority Report style Process Modelling interfaces. Accenture even offers a product around this space. Such spaces are indeed, as Theo suggests, a good 21st Century replacement for Postit notes, scissors and glue.

However, these interfaces are limited due to the absence of a spatial juxtaposition of the users connected via networking. What is needed is the ability to give a view of the networked collaborators shown working on the process model. My impressions of the remote collaborative capabilities of these spaces are that they cannot handle such remote collaboration well, especially when dealing with concurrent collaborative modelling. We still need to do some work on giving people easy remote access to modelling spaces, that give people a real 3D sense of the other people working on the model concurrently.

This is where I think Augmented Reality systems will come into great effect, as it enables the merging of synthetic networked spaces, with real physical spaces for collaboration purposes.

Ross