Managing Multiple Spaces

This chapter is about our experiences of space in the Equator project (www.equator.ac.uk), in particular, the way in which multiple spaces, both virtual and physical, can co-exist. By this we mean that people and objects may have locations in and relationships to both physical space and one or more virtual spaces, and that these different spaces together interact to give an overall system behaviour and user experience. The concepts we develop in this chapter are driven partly by practical experience, and partly by previous theoretical work such as the models and taxonomies of spatial context in, the models for mixed reality boundaries and capturing human spatial understanding exposed in sources such maps, myths and mathematics. We are also building on established work on informal reasoning about space from the AI and GIS communities similar to Allen's well known temporal relations.