Towards Online Immersive Collaborative Innovation Spaces

We live in an increasingly competitive world where success is closely linked to a person’s or organisation’s ability to innovate which, in turn, means that innovation has become increasingly important in education and business. One response to this has been the introduction of special environments, tailored to supporting innovation, namely Innovation-Labs (i-Labs). Research has shown that creativity thrives in environments that are playful and customizable, rather than in the somewhat sterile environments of most workplaces. In this paper, we describe our efforts to create a model for an online immersive environment that can be customized and dynamically adapted to the needs of individuals and specific innovation sessions. In creating this model we have been inspired by earlier pioneering work in innovation labs, virtual reality, HCI and the World Wide Web. This work-in-progress paper presents the output of our theoretical studies, and an initial specification for an immersive reality innovation space called iSuite. This environment is based on an underlying model that is made up of a number of innovative features which include a customisable template-based generic interfacing scheme which supports human-machine and machine-machine interactions and supporting systems to assist i-Lab users during brainstorming.