Flexible Shared Windows

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This research concerns infrastructure for supporting multiuser- interfaces. Two important criteria for evaluating such an infrastructure are the flexibility of the supported paradigms for (a) application-user interaction and (b) user-user sharing. Currently, an infrastructure offers either great interaction flexibility but limited sharing flexibility, or great sharing flexibility but limited interaction flexibility. The maximum interaction flexibility is offered by shared window systems, which allow multiple users to share a single logical window. However, these systems offer no sharing flexibility. The hypothesis of this research is that it is possible to significantly increase the sharing flexibility of these systems without reducing their interaction flexibility. This research identifies new software abstractions and architectures for establishing this hypothesis and uses an experimental method wherein the new concepts are implemented and used in validation experiments. If successful, it will lead to a new kind of infrastructure that automatically meets the sharing needs of a large class of multiuser user-interfaces that must today be implemented manually at great programming costs.