Spatial Memory for Augmented Personal Working Environments

Augmented Personal Working Environments (APWEs) are 3D environments in which the physical surroundings of the user are overlaid with representations of a virtual reality. With the rapid technological evolution of personal informatics devices as well as a growing demand for more comfortable and efficient working environments, the partial virtualization of resources used in our everyday work settings is expected to gradually become inevitable. Irrespective of whether someone is working in an office environment or in industrial settings, this trend in virtualization is expected to lead to more collaborative working environments in which the available resources and the interfaces for dealing with those resources can be both physical and virtual in nature. SpatialMemory, which is a memory system embedded in 3-dimensional physical reality, may without doubt be a central subsystem of future APWEs. In this paper, our goal is to contribute to the development of a theoretical background for Spatial Memory from a cognitive infocommunications perspective, and to outline the future research directions of Spatial Memory in APWEs based on some key applications.