People want to make better decisions, and to do that, they need better ways to think and collaborate. However, in today’s information-saturated world, the sheer volume and complexity of data can overwhelm even the best teams. Sorting through vast amounts of information, developing and sharing innovative ideas effectively, and reaching well-informed decisions quickly are challenges that traditional tools struggle to address.
SAGE3 tackles these challenges head-on by transforming how groups collaborate. As an open-source platform backed by over 20 years of National Science Foundation funded research [1,4], SAGE3 is designed to help teams make sense of complex information and work together more effectively. By seamlessly complementing with tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, and now integrating Artificial Intelligence, SAGE3 creates a unified environment where information and ideas can flow freely.
With real-time information sharing, AI and visualization capabilities, SAGE3 provides a dynamic platform for collaboration across laptops, meeting room projectors, and large tiled display walls- enabling teams to think more clearly, ideate more creatively, and reach decisions faster and with greater confidence.
Get introduced to SAGE3 in this brief video:
The following are examples of how to unleash SAGE3’s capabilities.
Space for Hyper Screen Sharing
If you’re tired of having to pass the dongle to give a presentation, SAGE3 is dongle-free. You can share multiple laptop/desktop screens at the same time wirelessly. Here for example you see 9 laptop screens simultaneously shared to a display wall during a meeting. On your laptop you will also be able to see all of them at the same time or zoom into any one of them to see the details.
Space for Seamless Content Sharing Across Displays
In SAGE3, collaboration occurs in boards. Any content you upload to a board is shared by all devices (laptops or display walls) that are viewing the board. So you can prepare content in advance at home and then go to work and stand in front of your display wall to give a presentation. Here’s an example of SAGE3 used for teaching class. This particular class has a board extended between two display walls. Students can move content between the two display walls by simply dragging them across the board.
Space with a Variety of Content Types
You can hold project meetings or give presentations using diverse and rich content like stickie notes, pictures, videos, pdf documents, Google docs, maps, web pages. Here’s how you can quickly add content to a board in SAGE3.
Space to Work with Artificial Intelligence
SAGE3 has a chat interface that not only lets you communicate with other users, but also to collaborate with AI (either with ChatGPT or Llama). Here is an example of how AI can help you ideate while taking advantage of SAGE3’s infinite canvas to visualize your train of thought.
In this example, AI is used to summarize and compare documents.
Space to Work with Spatialized Data Science Canvases
If you work in data science or data engineering, you can enhance your workflow by creating data science canvases with SAGECells, which are spatialized 2D code cells. Research by Virginia Tech has discovered many benefits of using 2D code canvases over traditional linear Jupyter Notebooks [2]. With SAGECells, even multiple developers can work on different cells simultaneously. And each cell can run the same or different Python kernels.
This video is an example of how to use SAGECells.
Space to Make Dashboards Without Coding
You can create custom data dashboards without coding by simply dragging and dropping URLs of existing web portals directly into SAGE3. Here’s an example showing an interactive dashboard of visualizations created with climate data.
Get Started Now!
To get started with SAGE3, just download the client software on your laptop, and connect to a hub (either Chicago, JetSage or Hawaii) closest to you. The software you use to drive a meeting room projector or display wall is the same client software you use for your laptop. You just need to download a copy of SAGE3 for the computer driving the display wall and launch it. At a later time, you can host your own hub should you wish to have a server entirely under your control. Lastly, SAGE3 can also be customized by developing native applications or plugins.
We hope you give SAGE3 a try and don’t hesitate to join the SAGE3 Discord channel.
A Brief History of SAGE
SAGE3 is the third generation of the SAGE (Scalable Amplified Group Environment) software that was released in 2004. Since then the SAGE project has continually been funded by the National Science Foundation as well as other external entities such as the Department of Energy, Army Research Lab, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, & Sharp Labs of America [3].
SAGE1 was middleware developed in C++ that enabled scientists, educators, and students to collaborate over high-speed networks, sharing visualization data streamed to large-scale high- resolution display walls. As the technical landscape advanced, SAGE2 (Scalable Amplified Group Environment), leveraged emerging JavaScript-based web technologies, increasing its accessibility to broader audiences. By 2018, SAGE2 had more than 5000 users across 800 institutions in 18 countries, spanning 22 disciplines. In response to the upsurge of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched SAGE3 (Smart Amplified Group Environment), a web-based spatial collaborative workspace that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and a wide array of applications in a “space to think.”[4]
References
- Reflecting on the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment Team’s 20-Year Translational Research Endeavor in Digital Collaboration Tools
M. Belcaid, J. Leigh, R. Theriot, N. Kirshenbaum, R. Tabalba, M. Rogers, A. Johnson, M. Brown, L. Renambot, L. Long, A. Nishimoto, C. North, J. Harden,
IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering, March-April 2023, pp. 50-56, vol. 25. - “There is no reason anybody should be using 1D anymore” : Design and Evaluation of 2D Jupyter Notebooks
J. Harden, E. Christman, N. Kirshenbaum, M. Belcaid, J. Leigh, C. North,
Graphics Interface, May 30-June 2, 2023. - Usage Patterns of Wideband Display Environments In e-Science Research, Development and Training
J. Leigh, M. Belcaid, D. Kobayashi, N. Kirshenbaum, T. Wooton, A. Gonzalez, L. Renambot, A. Johnson, M. Brown, A. Burks, K. Bharadwaj, A. Nishimoto, L. Long, J. Haga, R. Pelayo, J. Burns, F. Cristobal, J. McLean (2019).
eScience 2019, San Diego, California, USA, September 24-27, 2019. - Space to Think: Large High-Resolution Displays for Sensemaking
C. Andrews, A. Endert, and C. North
Proceedings of SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst., New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2010, pp. 55–64.