SAGE3 (the Smart Amplified Group Environment) is an open-source collaboration software designed for real-time interactive information and visualization sharing. Seamlessly complementing video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meets, it enhances group environments for information-rich collaboration.

With continuing funding from the National Science Foundation for the past 20 years, SAGE3 is the most powerful information collaboration platform in the world. SAGE3 users can collaborate on their laptops, meeting room projectors, and on large tiled display walls, which have been definitively shown to enable people to think, brainstorm, discover and reach decisions with greater speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and confidence [1,4].

Here are some examples of what SAGE3 can do to enhance your collaborations:

Space for Hyper Screen Sharing

You can share multiple laptop/desktop screens at the same time. Here for example you see 9 laptop screens simultaneously shared during a meeting.

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 an example of a board after a brainstorming meeting.

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.

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 server (either Chicago 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 server 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 [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

1. 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.
2. “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.
3. 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.
4. 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.