# Zoom Room: Hybrid Spatial Collaboration Environment

## Overview

**Zoom Room** is a next-generation hybrid collaboration interface designed to integrate remote participants' audiovisual streams, screenshares, and spatial viewpoints into a shared, immersive environment. It enables geospatially aware compositing of participant perspectives in both 2D and 3D, supporting collaboration between shipboard and shore-based mission teams.

## Core Components

### 🧑‍💻 Participant Cameras
- Remote user video feeds are distributed spatially across physical or virtual walls.
- Grouped by geography, role (e.g., scientist, mapper, storyteller), or topic.

### 🖥️ Screenshare Parsing
- Screenshare content is not treated as flat video:
  - If the content includes a **web map** (Leaflet, MapLibre, Esri, OpenLayers):
    - Extract bounding box (lat/lon), zoom level, and viewport center.
  - If the content includes a **3D viewer**:
    - Extract camera pose (position, orientation, field of view).

### 🗺️ 2D Map Integration
- Bounding boxes from shared maps are rendered as composited views on a unified web map canvas.
- Multiple views can be tiled or stitched, allowing multi-perspective exploration.
- Each participant’s viewport becomes an interactive portal.

### 🌍 3D Scene Integration
- Extracted camera poses are used to project user views into:
  - Web-based 3D environments (e.g., CesiumJS, Three.js).
  - Physical, geo-calibrated spaces (e.g., projection-mapped rooms via Simtable).

### 🔦 Laserpointer Interaction
- Laserpointers (IR or digital) enable embodied interaction:
  - Select and move windows, video feeds, and map views.
  - Redirect focus or shift collaboration hotspots.
  - Interact with both physical and digital projections.

## Use Cases

- **OceanX Hybrid Missions**: Enable shipboard and shore-based mission specialists to operate with shared visual context across dimensions.
- **Scientific Field Rooms**: Real-time compositing of remote field data, annotations, and photogrammetry into a cohesive scene.
- **Public Storytelling**: Transform expedition footage and map navigation into immersive museum or classroom experiences.

## Strategic Benefits

| Stakeholder           | Benefit                                                 |
|------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------|
| OceanX                 | Enhances real-time science storytelling and coordination |
| Redfish / Simtable     | Integrates camera pose and projection mapping pipelines  |
| Harvard Visualization Lab | Demonstrates spatial computing and hybrid presence     |
| Remote Participants    | Provides agency in shared mixed-reality environments     |

## Future Extensions

- AI-aided semantic recognition of screen content for richer parsing.
- Historical replay of spatial conversations (time navigation).
- Integration with Acequia.js for decentralized data sharing and versioned collaboration.

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> *Zoom Room* transforms hybrid meetings into compositional, geospatially aware mission spaces where science, narrative, and design co-evolve.