An Environment for Conducting and Analysing Graphical Communication Experiments

Drawing is a basic but often overlooked mode of human communication. This paper presents a shared whiteboard environment, written in Java, that was designed to be used to collect and analyse data gathered in interactive graphical communication experiments. Users of the software are presented with a ‘virtual’ whiteboard that is connected to another user’s whiteboard to create a shared graphical communication space. In addition to logging all drawing activity between the pair and providing tools for the analysis of this data, the software can manipulate the layout and the degree of interactivity of the drawing being exchanged. The program can also be used to setup and manage multiple simultaneous shared whiteboard connections and subject groupings.