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Molecular modeling is an important research area, helping scientists develop new drugs against diseases such as AIDS and cancer. Prior studies have demonstrated that immersive virtual environments have unique advantages over desktop systems in visualizing molecular models. However, exploration and interaction in existing molecular modeling virtual environments is often limited to a single user, lacking strong support for collaboration. In addition, scientists are often reluctant to adopt these systems because of their lack of availability and high cost. We propose an affordable immersive system that allows biologists and chemists to manipulate molecular models via natural gestures, receive and visualize real-time feedback from a molecular dynamics simulator, allow the sharing of customized views, and provide support for both local and remote collaborative research.

Future teleconferencing may enhance communication between remote people by supporting non-verbal communication within an unconstrained space where people can move around and share the manipulation of artefacts. By linking walk-in displays with a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) platform we are able to physically situate a distributed team in a spatially organised social and information context. We have found this to demonstrate unprecedented naturalness in the use of space and body during non-verbal communication and interaction with objects.However, relatively little is known about how people interact through this technology, especially while sharing the manipulation of objects. We observed people engaged in such a task while geographically separated across national boundaries. Our analysis is organised into collaborative scenarios, that each requires a distinct balance of social human communication with consistent shared manipulation of objects.Observational results suggest that walk-in displays do not suffer from some of the important drawbacks of other displays. Previous trials have shown that supporting natural non-verbal communication, along with responsive and consistent shared object manipulation, is hard to achieve. To better understand this problem, we take a close look at how the scenario impacts on the characteristics of event traffic. We conclude by suggesting how various strategies might reduce the consistency problem for particular scenarios.

Most previous collaborative virtual environments mainly use spatial aspect to implement interest management. However, it turns to be difficult to manage awareness using semantic or organization considerations, specially in densely populated open space environments. Aiming at this kind of applications, we propose a novel interest management model with dynamic interaction analysis in CVE. Our work is concerned with dynamic interaction in crowds, from which we derive the semantics of user behaviors, more specifically, the alteration of interest focus of users. Above all, we would define the construction of Interest Network. Then an interaction analysis approach is introduced to find out the interest focus of virtual humans. Psychology effects in crowd or a group of participants are also analyzed and incorporated in our approach. Lastly, a prototype virtual conference application is implemented to demonstrate the effects of our model on optimizing collaborative awareness.

The capabilities of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)/Extensible 3D (X3D) permit building collaborative virtual environments (CVE) using the Internet and the World Wide Web. However, they do not provide a multi-user collaborative interaction management mechanism for CVE applications except the External Authoring Interface that allows communication between external program and VRML browser. The authors of such applications must manage the interactions among the interactive entities by themselves through capturing user interaction with particular virtual entities and propagating them to the affected users. This application-specific method leads to inflexibility in reusing collaborative role definitions and adapting various collaborative interaction management methods. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Behavior Description Language(CDBL) to address the identified issues. The syntax and sample applications of CBDL will be presented in details. Our work shows that CBDL enables the reuse of collaborative role definitions and scene descriptions to construct flexible CVE with adaptive underlying collaborative interaction management methods.

To support real-time natural interaction in the Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) with limited network bandwidth and computer processing power, the development of an efficient interaction management mechanism is a key issue. In this paper, we propose a behavior based interaction management mechanism for managing the collaborative interactions among the distributed users in our developed SmartCU3D, an Internet CVE system. With this mechanism, message routing in the system becomes adaptive to the application and the users' runtime interaction. It is achieved by giving the Object-Oriented style collaborative behavior description along with the 3D environment definition for every individual CVE application. The motivation of this research is to develop a framework to support a flexible and adaptive interaction management mechanism for developing different CVE applications.