The Virtual Reality User Interface (VRUI) is an open-source platform for collaborative and immersive data exploration used at several research institutions. VRUI was uniquely designed from the beginning to be hardware-agnostic, and in recent years has been adapted to run on new generations of consumer VR headsets. This grant supports an ambitious plan to rebuild and better document the project’s configuration and interaction systems, substantially lowering the technical expertise required to run VRUI on a new dataset. To diversify the project’s supporters, this grant will support software contributions from and applications by labs at NIST and Villanova. While the data visualization aspects of VRUI are compelling in their own right, its ability to support multi-user, remote, real-time collaboration is perhaps even more exciting. Nearly all social VR platforms on the market are centrally hosted, requiring one to connect to servers run by Meta or other large companies to interact with others. At a time of potential consolidation of social VR into a small number of platforms, VRUI offers an alternative vision of locally managed social infrastructure in science (and beyond).

ARCH is a collaboration platform for small communities of intellectual inquiry. It integrates open source chat and videoconferencing tools with a sophisticated commenting and annotation engine for videos and transcripts, collaborative notetaking and document editing, and document sharing capabilities. In the wake of Covid-19 disruptions, the Santa Fe Institute realized that ubiquitous industry technologies like Zoom were ill-suited to extend into a hybrid space the rich collaborations and sub-communities that drive their research. In an effort led by SFI Vice President for Applied Complexity, Will Tracy, ARCH has been piloted successfully in a small number of events, including a 16-institution research network as well as a global SFI summer school. Funds from this grant support these activities, as well as the further development, documentation, research, and packaging of the ARCH platform so it can be used at wider scale both inside SFI and beyond.

Communal computing is a new computing paradigm in which people work together side-by-side in the real world, using their hands to create and explore computational models made of physical materials. In this project, a biotechnology lab will be restructured around communal computing, and a complete science project will be carried out in this new computing environment. The goal is to demonstrate an unprecedented level of visibility, agency, physicality and in-person collaboration. This effort aims to set the stage for a comprehensive transformation in how all scientists do their work together. This grant will support proof-of-concept use of the Realtalk system in a specific scientific context. Grant funds will support the construction of Realtalk communal computing environments which will be used by Shawn Douglas and others in his lab to advance the technology of DNA Origami.