‘Mountains of work’: spatialization of work projects in a virtual geographic environment

Abstract

The challenge of successfully managing multiple work projects is a highly complex one, requiring advanced time management amongst other skills. This research proposes spatialization – making non-spatial phenomena spatial – as a novel alternative to the many digital and analogue tools that help people manage project time. A virtual geographic environment (VGE) demonstration prototype spatialization built in the OpenSimulator online virtual environment is presented here. A landscape visual metaphor is employed, through which 3D terrain depicts project areas as proportional to project duration, and ‘hills’ in the landscape are sized according to project difficulty. Progress on the project is assumed to be marked from the boundary to the project finish, which is the ‘summit’ of the zone. There are explicit path objects in the VGE to reinforce this, as well as a beacon object at the summit. Advantages include visualization of all of a user’s projects at once, though there is the loss of a unified time structure, since each project has its own time–space. The avatar-driven exploration that VGEs can afford enhances the potential positive cognitive involvement of the user. Also, the online VGE offers opportunities for virtual project meetings in the spatialized environment. Issues to be addressed in future include increasing the within-project complexity in the spatialization, adding semantic meaning to the placement of projects in the VGE and using cartographic (colour and texture) and terrain (smoothness for uncertainty) variables to depict other project attributes.