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Collaborative academia-industry development and evaluation of virtual reality (VR) systems is a mutually beneficial opportunity to investigate VR technology in a real context and conduct user studies with target users. However, such collaboration is rarely performed due to variations in project pace and work methods. In this article, we introduce the process of action research on joint design, development, and evaluation of a collaborative VR system to address industrial needs. The paper further presents employees’ subjective opinions and perceived value of industrial VR applica- tions and reflects on their involvement throughout the process. The article concludes with a process-oriented framework for remote academia-industry collaboration, supported with practical sugges- tions on how to support this collaboration. Our experiences reveal the methods and advantages of remote collaboration in all phases of the process and signify the efficiency of the remote framework for academia-industry collaboration, especially relevant in the light of the COVID-19 pandemia acceptedVersion

Virtual reality (VR) enables immersive applications that make rich content available independent of time and space. By replacing or supplementing physical face-to-face meetings, VR could also radically change how we socially interact with others. Despite this potential, the effect of transferring physical collaborative experience into a virtual one is unclear. Therefore, we investigated the experience differences between a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) and a physical environment. We used a museum visit as a task since it is a typical social experience and a promising use case for VR. 48 participants experienced the task in real and virtual environments, either alone or with a partner. Despite the potential of CVEs, we found that being in a virtual environment has adverse effects on the experience which is reinforced by being in the environment with another person. Based on quantitative and qualitative results, we provide recommendations for the design of future multi-user virtual environments.

The number of social VR applications-or applications that support social interaction between users in virtual reality-has grown considerably in recent years. A consequence of this growth is that the state of social VR application design has become increasingly obfuscated, which complicates identification of design trends, best practices, and uncommon features that are perhaps worthy of wider adoption. To help address this problem, this paper presents a taxonomy of social VR application design choices as informed by 29 commercial and prototypical applications in the literature. Discussion of the taxonomy highlights novel features of research prototypes that could potentially enrich the social experience in commercially available applications. The paper concludes by considering how the taxonomy can guide future design of social VR applications, and next steps for refining the taxonomy.

With the availability of powerful and affordable Augmented Reality (AR) devices, scenarios have become popular in which people wearing AR devices are supported by remote experts. These experts often use 2D peripherals to access the video feed of the 3D head mounted device (HMD) and to augment it with verbal or digital information. This raises the question whether tools that work for these scenarios also work for remote consultations. We conducted a study to (re-)evaluate these tools in a furniture sales consultation context. We focused on the consultant side of these settings and explored how the use of different pointing methods and perspectives affect different situations during a consultation. For this, we developed and evaluated a prototype with ten furniture store workers. Initial results show that while most usability and task load scores were even, the participants reported clear favorites for certain settings. We use these results to derive design recommendations for similar future projects.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-generated experience that can simulate physical presence in real or imagined environments [7]. A social VR system is an application that allows multiple users to join a collaborative Virtual Environment (VE), such as a computer-generated 3D scene or a 360-degree natural scene captured by an omnidirectional camera, and communicate with each other, usually by means of visual and audio cues. Each user is represented in the VE as a computer-generated avatar [3] or, in recently proposed systems, with a virtual representation based on live captures [1]. Depending on the system, the user’ virtual representation can also interact with the virtual environment, for example by manipulating virtual objects, controlling the appearance of the VE, or controlling the playout of additional media in the VE. The interest for social Virtual Reality (VR) systems dates back to the late 90s [4, 8] but has recently increased [2, 5, 6] due to the availability of affordable head-mounted displays on the consumer market and to the appearance of new applications, such as Facebook Spaces, YouTube VR, Hulu VR, which explicitly aim at including social features in existing VR platforms for multimedia delivery. In this talk, we will address the problem of measuring user Quality of Experience (QoE) in social VR systems. We will review the studies that have analysed how different features of a social VR system design, such as avatar appearance and behavioural realism, can affect user’s experience, and propose a comparison of the objective and subjective measures used in the literature to quantify user QoE in social VR. Finally, we will discuss the use case of watching movies together in VR and present the results of one of our recent studies focusing on this scenario, designed and performed in the framework of the European project VRTogether (http://vrtogether.eu). Particularly, we show an analysis of correlation between the objective and subjective measurements collected during our study, to provide guidelines toward the design of a unified methodology to monitor and quantify users’ QoE in social VR systems. The open questions to be addressed in the future in order to achieve such goal are also discussed.

Collaboration among research scientists across multiple types of visualizations and platforms is useful to enhance scientific workflow and lead to unique analysis and discovery. However, current analytic tools and visualization infrastructure lack sufficient capabilities to fully support collaboration across multiple types of visualizations, display/interactive systems, and geographically distributed researchers. We have combined, adapted, and enhanced several emerging immersive and visualization technologies into a novel collaboration system that will provide scientists with the ability to connect with other scientists to work together across multiple visualization platforms (i.e. stereoscopic versus monoscopic), multiple datasets (i.e. 3-Dimensional versus 2-Dimensional data), and multiple visualization techniques (i.e. volumetric rendering versus 2D plots). We have demonstrated several use cases of this system in materials science, manufacturing, planning, and others. In one such use case, our collaboration system imports material science data (i.e., graphite billet) and enable multiple scientists to analyze and explore the density change of graphite across immersive and non-immersive systems, which will help to understand the potential structural problem in it. We recruited scientists that work with the datasets we demonstrate in three use case scenarios and conducted an experimental user study to evaluate our novel collaboration system on scientific visualization workflow effectiveness. In this paper, we present the results on task completion time, task performance, user experience, and feedback among multiple and feedback among multiple geographically distributed collaborators using different multiple-platform for collaboration.

In a co-located collaborative virtual environment, multiple users share the same physical tracked space and the same virtual workspace. When the virtual workspace is larger than the real workspace, navigation interaction techniques must be deployed to let the users explore the entire virtual environment. When a user navigates in the virtual space while remaining static in the real space, his/her position in the physical workspace and in the virtual workspace are no longer the same. Thus, in the context where each user is immersed in the virtual environment with a Head-Mounted-Display, a user can still perceive where his/her collaborators are in the virtual environment but not where they are in real world. In this paper, we propose and compare three methods to warn users about the position of collaborators in the shared physical workspace to ensure a proper cohabitation and safety of the collaborators. The frst one is based on a virtual grid shaped as a cylinder, the second one is based on a ghost representation of the user and the last one displays the physical safe-navigation space on the foor of the virtual environment. We conducted a user-study with two users wearing a Head-Mounted-Display in the context of a collaborative First-Person-Shooter game. Our three methods were compared with a condition where the physical tracked space was separated into two zones, one per user, to evaluate the impact of each condition on safety, displacement freedom and global satisfaction of users. Results suggest that the ghost avatar and the cylinder grid can be good alternatives to the separation of the tracked space.

This research present a case-study based from the student projects working to create 3d environment by using an online collaborative virtual environment platform to enhance their collaborative learning experience. For this project, Minecraft was chosen as main platform to complete this task. This projects main intention was to adapt the seven principles of facilitating student engagement by using the virtual reality medium as technology. Students were also to explore and identify the important characteristic of collaborative virtual environment and implement the same concept in their collaborative virtual environment projects. The reviews highlighted by the students were also discussed to derive an insight of the specific elements that can enhance student's engagement and learning experience for collaborative virtual environment. Furthermore, this paper will describe the way requirements were gathered from student's project and the impact to their learning experience.

We have developed a phantom gui emulator that can read from otherwise stand-alone applications, complementing a separate parallel program that can write to such applications. In conjunction with the "Alice" desktop vr system and previously developed "Collaborative Virtual Environment" both of which are freely available, virtual scene exploration can synchronize with multimodal peers, including panoramic browsers, spatial sound renderers, and smartphone and tablet interfaces.

There exists a large base of evidence for gender differences in human navigation. However, there is not much research on gender differences in collaborative aspects of navigation, including the interaction of individuals during collaborative wayfinding tasks in virtual environments. In light of this, we present a study of a collaborative virtual environment, Berlin Kompass. The goal of this study was to find out the main differences between genders in collaborative wayfinding. The application was evaluated in the context of foreign language learning in schools with over 200 students, where the users navigated through cityscapes while interacting verbally with each other. We collected and analyzed interaction logs, questionnaire data and audio and video recordings to gain insights into gender-related differences in wayfinding in virtual worlds. Our findings suggest that several differences that are evident in single user systems are not present when the collaborative aspect is added. Male users were more immersed during the task than females. One of the explaining factors for this might be video game experience. Genders also communicated differently -- males spoke in longer utterances whereas females had more, shorter utterances. Males referred more to relative directions and dynamic landmarks such as cars and pedestrians while navigating. Males with more video game experience also provided more positive subjective user experience feedback on the application.

In this paper, we describe the enactment of autonomous agents and avatars in the web-based social collaborative virtual environment of REVERIE that supports natural, human-like behavior, physical interaction and engagement. Represented by avatars, users feel immersed in this virtual world in which they can meet and share experiences as in real life. Like the avatars, autonomous agents that may act in this world are capable of demonstrating human-like non-verbal behavior and facilitate social interaction. We describe how reasoning components of the REVERIE system connect and cooperatively control autonomous agents and avatars representing a user.

Designating targets, such as elementary primitives (e.g., vertices, edges and faces) or complex objects (e.g., 3D objects and structures), to a partner in Collaborative Virtual Environments is a real challenge in different applications. In fact, the communication constraints in such environments limit the understanding of the partner's actions, which lead to wrong selections and thus to conflicting actions. Beyond these limitations, applications providing complex data to manipulate, such as molecular environments, introduce additional constraints which limit the perception and access to the partner's working space. This paper proposes a remote designation procedure linked with an haptic attraction model for molecular deformation tasks, we propose to guide physically the partner to the designated atom. Experimental results showed a significant improvement in performance and efficiency for the different steps of collaborative tasks (i.e., designation/selection of atoms and deformation of structures). Moreover, this haptic guidance method enables more accurate selections of atoms for the partner.

Virtual environments facilitate group collaboration through avatars. While many studies have examined the effects of avatar attributes on users' behaviors and attitudes, few have explicitly tested how elements of avatar design relate to group collaboration satisfaction. The present study fills this gap using data from a field study with student groups in a collaborative virtual environment. Customizing an avatar to express identity was found to relate to more satisfaction with group collaboration, while similarity between the avatar and user's masculinity traits was related to less group collaboration satisfaction. Further, groups with fewer active members reported higher group collaboration satisfaction. Unexpectedly, number of customizations and using a face-similar were not related to group collaboration satisfaction, potentially due to limitations in the present design for which future research can account. These findings suggest that avatar design elements play an important role in collaborative virtual environments.

We built a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) allowing one person, the 'visitor' to be digitally transported to a remote destination to interact with local people there. This included full body tracking, vibrotactile feedback and voice. This allowed interactions in the same CVE between multiple people situated in different physical remote locations. This system was used for an experiment to study whether the conveyance of touch has an impact on the willingness of participants embodied in the CVE to sing in public.In a first experimental condition, the experimenter virtually touched the avatar of the participants on the shoulder, producing vibrotactile feedback. In another condition using the identical physical setup, the vibrotactile displays were not activated, so that they would not feel the touch. Our hypothesis was that the tactile touch condition would produce a greater likelihood of compliance with the request to sing. In a second part we examined the hypothesis that people might be more willing to sing (execute an embarrassing task) in a CVE, because of the anonymity provided by virtual reality. Hence we carried out a similar study in physical reality.The results suggest that the tactile intervention had no effect on the sensations of body ownership, presence or the behaviours of the participants, in spite of the finding that the sensation of touch itself was effectively realised. Moreover we found an overall similarity in responses between the VR and real conditions.

Dead reckoning algorithms are employed in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) for predicting virtual objects states at any given moment of time that makes it possible to minimize bandwidth requirements while maintaining required data consistency. However, existing implementations often do not take into account information on the object motion dynamics and, in general, apply static prediction models. In this paper a novel motion-aware adaptive dead reckoning algorithm (MAADR) is introduced based on dynamical prediction model selection depending on the object motion pattern. The results show that considerable reduction in a number of update messages can be achieved without sacrificing prediction accuracy. In addition, it becomes possible to dynamically adjust the size of update messages according to the motion pattern and, thus, provide more flexible use of network bandwidth.

Alice is an innovative 3d programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation. Many virtual environment (ve) models are available in the Alice 3d environment. We created ve scenes using the Alice 3d ide (integrated development environment). We deploy a beat detector to detect the rhythm of a song, based on pd (Pure Data, a free dataflow programming environment similar to max/msp). It can extract the beat of a song in realtime. Using our Alice--Cve (Collaborative Virtual Environment) Bridge and Pd--Cve Bridge, we can create a communication link between the beat detector and Alice 3d environment. The cve is a Java client--server protocol in which clients connect to session server host via channels, and when clients need to communicate with each other they subscribe to the same channel. The Alice--Cve Bridge allows any device that can connect to the cve server to communicate with Alice without regard for architectural differences. When a song is played, its beat can be detected and data sent to animate objects and avatars. An avatar can dance (admittedly poorly) in the Alice 3d environment while receiving a realtime rhythm data stream from a cve session server. Stage color and other attributes a can also be rhythmically changed according to the beat using the same communication link.

With the emergence of virtual environments, even ordinary computer users can drag-and-drop 3d objects (cities, buildings, furniture, instruments, controls, animals and avatars) from galleries and arrange them to create attractive cyber-worlds. We have created a virtual concert application using Alice, a 3d rapid prototyping programming environment, in which instruments are arranged around a virtual conductor (in this case the user) located at their center. A user-conductor with a smartphone can use it as a simplified baton, pointing at a preferred instrument and tapping to select or start playing. When selected, an instrument is jiggled or its components dilated and contracted, and a spotlight appears until the instrument is muted, providing the conductor and audience with visual cues about the ensemble. One can also adjust volume/panning of a selected instrument by sliding corresponding controls on the smart-phone screen. Alice 3 (Beta) provides a rich api to control and display objects, but native audio capabilities are limited to playing an audio file and adjusting individual volume before playing. Using a plugin for NetBeans, Alice programs (scenarios) can be edited as Java code outside Alice. With the Java Sound api, which provides more complete control for controlling sampled audio and midi, we implement audio-related functions to the virtual concert. Smartphones have magnetometers that can be used to detect yaw, which data is acquired through a compatible programming language and library. Spatial information of smartphones can be accessed using the platform's api and transmitted to a collaborative virtual environment (cve) session server via Wi--Fi. A middleware program, the "Alice--Cve Bridge," retrieves these events through the server and selects/plays/adjusts instruments in the Alice-rendered virtual environment. Such explorations suggest the power of emerging mobile devices as generalized remote controls for interactive multimedia and ubiquitous computing.

Motivation -- To understand the interrelation between participation framework(s) and uses of communication media (spatiality, voice, text, gestures) in Second Life meetings.Research approach -- Our approach is based on observational data as well as interviews of participants in six meetings in educational and professional settings.Findings/Design -- Our preliminary results suggest (1) interrelation between avatars' spatial position, roles and feeling of spatialised co-presence, (2) Regulation of attention workload by the span of used modalities depending on role, (3) Parallel dialogs via various modalities and mediation role.Research limitations/Implications -- Only six SL meetings were analysed with SL newcomers and users.Originality/Value -- Our analytical framework is based on the combination of two perspectives: a third view perspective based on analyses of observational data and a first view perspective based on users reports on their experience in SL.Take away message -- Designing collaborative virtual environment should be based on the understanding of the variety of use-cases with concomitant variance in SL communication media.

This paper presents the first in-depth evaluation of a large multi-format virtual conference. The conference took place in an avatar-based 3D virtual world with spatialized audio, and had keynote, poster and social sessions. We studied it by drawing on logs, a survey and interviews with 30 participants. We develop a model - Coalescence, Focused Interaction, Remixing (CoFIRe) -- of large synchronous interactions, and use it to discuss how the technology supported, or failed to support, the interactions that are the raison d'etre of conferences. We conclude by discussing the prospects for such large virtual gatherings.

We introduce TwinSpace, a flexible software infrastructure for combining interactive workspaces and collaborative virtual worlds. Its design is grounded in the need to support deep connectivity and flexible mappings between virtual and real spaces to effectively support collaboration. This is achieved through a robust connectivity layer linking heterogeneous collections of physical and virtual devices and services, and a centralized service to manage and control mappings between physical and virtual. In this paper we motivate and present the architecture of TwinSpace, discuss our experiences and lessons learned in building a generic framework for collaborative cross-reality, and illustrate the architecture using two implemented examples that highlight its flexibility and range, and its support for rapid prototyping.

In this paper, the author presents DynamiCross, a system that enables users to dynamically represent and share information in cross-reality. Recently, designers and meeting attendees have enhanced engagement through a multiple display environments (MDE) [2, 5], which include not only personal objects, such as papers and laptops, but also shared objects, such as large displays, to provide collaborators with a virtual workspace. In this paper, the author describes how DynamiCross can support the user's individual or collaborative information handling with its cross-reality interfaces and multiple displays. In addition, when a user's personal material is placed on a large display, the display becomes a multilayer display that uses augmented reality (AR) technology to show digital contents of the personal object. The author introduces three major functions of the system to explain these capabilities which could be beneficial to similar research on cross-reality collaborations and paper interactions.

Internet-based virtual worlds (VWs) have emerged as a popular form of collaborative virtual environment. Most have offered only text chat for user communication; however several VWs have recently introduced voice. While research has demonstrated benefits of voice, its introduction into the popular VW Second Life (SL) was controversial, and some users have rejected it. In order to understand the benefits and problems that voice brings to virtual worlds, we used qualitative methods to gather data from SL users and analyse it. We discuss our results in the light of media-richness theory and its critiques, arguing that preferences for voice or text reflect a broader problem of managing social presence in virtual contexts.

Today, there is a growing in terest in using online communities to support either social interaction or Public Administration (PA) digital inclusion, both in geography-based communities and geographically distributed users of the Internet. In this paper we present a pseudo 3D (2,5D) configurable virtual environment that uses the "plaza metaphor" to virtually represent the natural place where citizens meet and socialize. Information exchanged among users generates a lot of data difficult to store in a structured way. We propose the use of ontologies to categorize data in order to provide to the user the right information according to his/her specific profile, context and location. The advantages of the proposed approach are an improvement of the users ' "Sense of Locality" and a better and more direct relationship between citizens and Public Administration.

We present two empirical studies of two pairs of students collaborating on two small product design sessions in both face-to-face and distributed settings while using computer-mediated communication technologies and a collaborative virtual environment. The study shows that teams spent more time working together when using programs that support shared sketching capabilities or shared viewing of 3D objects.

In the research community, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) developers usually refer to the terms awareness and feedback as something necessary to maintain a fluent collaboration when highly interactive task have to be performed. However, it is remarkable that few studies address the effect that including special kind of awareness has on the task performance and the user experience.This paper proposes how to face the implementation of awareness in order to be taken into account early in the development of a CVE. In addition, it is also described an experiment that was carried out to evaluate the effect of providing some visual cues, showing that users tend to make more mistakes when they are not provided.

The aim of this experiment was to determine to which extent humans optimize their walking behavior in different conditions while navigating in a virtual maze. In two conditions participants either walked individually or jointly connected - carrying a physical stretcher. The results showed that an extra effort due to the task-required cooperation was split evenly within the group, even though the sensory feedback about the physical and social environment was significantly different for leader (e.g. was not able to see the follower) and follower (e.g. was able to see the leader). These results might indicate the emergence of a joint body: a phenomenon in which two individual action-perception loops are tuned towards each other in order to optimize a common goal.

Second Life is a virtual world which is often used for the synchronous meeting of teams. However, supporting distributed meeting goes beyond supporting user activities during the meeting itself, because it is also necessary to facilitate their coordination, arrangement and set up.In this paper we investigate how teams can work together more effectively in Second Life. We also propose a system, named SLMeeting, which enhances the communication facilities of Second Life to support the management of collaborative activities, organized as conferences or Job meetings and later replayed, queried, analyzed and visualized. The meeting organization and management functionalities are performed by ad-hoc developed Second Life objects and by the communication between these objects and a supporting web site. As a result, the functionalities offered by Second Life are enriched with the capabilities of organizing meetings and recoding all the information concerning the event.

In this work, we analyse the effect of network parameters on the judged usability of a collaborative virtual environment. Participants were trained to find the exit of a virtual maze by a trainer, which guided the exploration of the virtual space. An extensive experimental evaluation was conducted by simulating a series of operational parameters (network bandwidth and latency) to assess the reported effectiveness of the training. An objective similarity metric based on processing time per test was also defined and used, as well as subjective user's evaluations. Further, we have successfully correlated subjective evaluation and objective measure by computing the correlation values and showing how the two values co-vary.

This paper presents a grid-based large-scale web3D collaborative virtual environment that has the capability of scaling across multiple geographically dispersed resources. The architecture consists of distributed mobile agents working cooperatively in supporting and managing the web3D collaborative virtual environments. The mobile agents' tasks include managing persistency and consistency of the virtual worlds, maintaining reliability and efficiency of user interactions, ensuring security and integrity of data and systems. The mobile agents are autonomous and have the ability of migrating among hosts to maximize resource utilizations. Grid technologies allow the mobile agents to execute and communicate securely in multiple administrative domains. Grid-based scheduling components and polices are integrated to provide intelligent resource optimizations. Furthermore, a better load-balancing can be achieved by utilizing additional or more accurate information like data-user proximity and hosts' workload. The result will be a more scalable and robust architecture for supporting large-scale web3D collaborative virtual environment.

In this paper, we explore ways to combine the video of a remote person with a shared tabletop display to best emulate face-to-face collaboration. Using a simple photo application we compare a variety of social and performance measures of collaboration of a standard non-spatial 2D interface with two approaches for adding spatial cues to videoconferencing: one based on simulated immersive 3D, the other based on video streams in a physically fixed arrangement around an interactive table. A face-to-face condition is included as a 'gold-standard' control. As expected, social presence and task measures were superior in the face-to-face condition, but there were also important differences between the 2D and spatial interfaces. In particular, the spatial interfaces positively influenced social presence and copresence measures in comparison to 2D, but the task measures favored the two-dimensional interface.

With the advent of the objects-first approach for introductory programming, instructors are challenged to think differently regarding the projects and exercises they create for their classrooms. The objects-first approach reduces the emphasis on syntax and encourages the student to focus upon the proper construction and use of classes. This change in emphasis means that students must understand the relationships between classes within a code solution and how such relationships affect the overall design of a system. Unfortunately, such critical thinking exercises can prove challenging to the introductory student, especially if presented in an manner. In this paper, the authors examine how fundamental principles such as inheritance, composition, and association can be conveyed to introductory programming students within a collaborative virtual environment. The examples chosen follow established guidelines for objects-first examples while leveraging features of an engaging, three-dimensional interactive environment.

Product assembly design is a complex design activity which may involve collaboration among designers geographically distributed. And the development of virtual reality applications for assembly design can provide designers with a more realistic environment to evaluate their assembly process. We create a web-based virtual environment supporting designers from different places with different platforms to engage in the same assembly scenario and complete the assembly task synchronously. This paper firstly presents the architecture of the environment based on an assembly design scenario. Secondly, two key technologies including multimodal interaction and task processing, which are closely related to the architecture, are discussed in detail. At last, we give our implementations and discuss limitations in our current research effort.

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.

Video games are of increasing importance, both as a cultural phenomenon and as an application of collaborative technology. In particular, many recent online games feature persistent collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), with complex social organisation and strong social bonds between players. This paper presents a study of 'There', one such game, focusing on how There has been appropriated by its players. In particular we describe how its flexibility has allowed players to develop their own forms of play within the game. Three aspects of There are discussed: first, how the environment supports a range of social activities around objects. Second, how the chat environment is used to produce overlapping chat and how the game itself provides topics for conversation. Lastly, how the 'place' of There is a fluid interaction space that supports safe interactions between strangers. The paper concludes by drawing design lessons concerning the importance of supporting shared online activity, interaction between strangers, and the difficulties of designing for play.

Mission Queen Maud Land (MQML) is a collaborative virtual environment that was developed to explore new ways to stimulate secondary school pupils to collaborate in grasping complex subject matter. MQML is designed for five simultaneous users (four pupils and a teacher) and it combines a collaborative virtual environment with a web site and audio narratives. Basic concepts from molecular biology and genetic engineering form the educational core in MQML, and it enables the participants to explore the DNA molecule and to unravel the genetic code by interactions both on a macroscopic and a microscopic level. A background story was developed with the purpose of adding excitement and engagement to the subject matter. The audio narratives were used to convey the story while the web site provided the necessary background information. This paper describes our design approach for making the subject matter easy to understand, and for eliciting collaborative work processes among the participants. Finally, we report results from evaluations of MQML during a field study in the secondary school.

Through capitalizing on research in the areas of gaming and virtual community social psychology, RIT is engaged in a project to develop a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) entitled "The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study" (MUPPETS). The MUPPETS system will be aimed specifically at engaging upper-division students in the education of lower-division students through their first-year programming core. The authors have built upon existing research and technical developments in the field to design and construct a CVE and supporting infrastructure that allows students to write very simple Java code similar to, and constructed around the same pedagogical issues as, code written in a more traditional course of first year study. As part of the MUPPETS system, however, this code can now control objects in a shared virtual world very much like an online massively-multiplayer game that many prospective students are already familiar with. Upper level students also populate the system in a structure of their own, and this population will be aimed at encouraging and rewarding student engagement and peer knowledge-transmission.The use of the freshman year to provide a programming core is not unique to Information Technology programs, and is in fact implemented (and also problematic) at most institutions with programs in computing. It is the opinion of the authors that while there is moderate success in many of these programs, there is a rapidly occurring shift in the overall student population such that students are no longer as interested or engaged in their coursework as they were in previous years, and this apathy can be seen in spectacular fashion during the first year programming core. This is attributed to the fact that unlike the applications that many students are motivated to build, the first year experience is often centered on non-visual applications, and/or problems that hold no particular interest for first-year students.(This is largely because first-year classes cannot move beyond basic techniques, since the population is just beginning to master programming techniques.) Because universities around the world are currently faced with the issue of how best to engage students in programming coursework, this study, once conducted, should be interesting to a large number of institutions at several academic levels. This paper focuses on the first year of development of the MUPPETS system, and presents tentative results based on trials conducted in first-year programming courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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.

Virtual reality technology is increasingly being applied to globally distributed teams engaged in collaborative product design. Observations of product design teams have suggested at least four distinct modes of collaboration-complementary, competitive, peer-to-peer, and leader-follower. Another insight from observation is that collaboration consists of fluid transitions between these modes in the accomplishment completion of the design task, driven by a flexible process of subgrouping and regrouping which reflects the structure and progress of the task. Yet most collaborative virtual environment systems support only one mode of collaboration-peer-to-peer-and those that do explicitly support multiple modes (or even individual roles) do not allow fluid transitions between them in the context of the same task. In addition, no explicit support is provided to allow subgroups to be formed and dissolved. To address this problem, a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) for product design that supports multiple collaboration modes and fluid transitions is proposed; two metaphors for collaborative product design (collaboration tree and infinitely recursive conference room) are introduced; the use of a collaboration tree interface widget is detailed; and the Simple Shared Virtual Environment (SSVE) toolkit for collaborative virtual environments is described.

A multiscale Collaborative Virtual Environment (mCVE) is a virtual world in which multiple users can independently resize themselves to work together on different sized aspects of very large and complicated structures. Interactions among users in an mCVE differ in many ways from those in traditional collaborative virtual environments. In this paper we explore collaboration-related issues affected by multiscale, such as social presence, perception of proximity, and cross-scale information sharing. We also report results of an experiment with our mCVE prototype system, which show the impact of multiscale capabilities on social interactions.

This sketch describes DocuDrama, a tool that offers a generation of interactive narratives that are based on activities in a collaborative virtual environment. DocuDrama [Schafer et al. 2001] is built as part of TOWER [2002], a Theatre of Work Enabling Relationships, which allows project members to be aware of project relevant activities as well as to establish and maintain the social relationships that intensify team coherence.

A collaborative virtual environment system is described that is designed to support location-independent shared analysis of spatial data and urban planning proposals. The system seeks to extend the physical workplace of participants into the virtual environment, while preserving traditional textual and verbal communication and cooperation mechanisms. The systems aim is to improve productivity, quality and achieve more transparency in the planning process. The architecture of the Collaborative Urban Planner or CUP system is described and some experimental results that demonstrate urban development control tasks performed within this environment are presented. An application scenario offers a vision of future urban planning practice using CUP. The scenario also diagrammatically demonstrates virtual settings and scenes that could become everyday meeting places for remote planners, architects or engineers assessing proposals and discussing possible alterations to designs.

Collaborative Virtual Environments are a class of desktop applications that allow the user to explore a 3D environment, being aware of the presence, the position and the activity of other users, which share the same space. In virtual environments oriented to Cultural Heritage contents, it is thus possible to envision collaboration between users, focused to learning in an innovative and intriguing way. While several CVE frameworks are present both in commercial and research contexts, most of them overlook the issue of regulating in an ordered fashion the collaboration between users to support their learning. The WebTalk framework developed at Politecnico di Milano aims at supporting CSCL via complex collaboration between peers and teachers connected to a Virtual Environment.Based on the experience of our previous collaborative 3D projects for museums, we recently implemented a new environment, the reconstruction of the 'Ideal City' of Leonardo da Vinci, excerpted from various portions of his manuscripts. The curatorial side of the project was led by the National Science Museum 'Leonardo da Vinci' in Milan, Italy, while a team of modelers and programmers used our new Collaborative Framework, named WebTalk-II, to deploy the application. The Collaborative 3D Virtual Ideal City will be soon online at the National Science Museum's WebSite.The project website is at the following URL: http://webtalk.elet.polimi.it

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.

In this paper we will discuss different types of control over synthetic characters in interactive stories. We will argue that, to attain a deeper and more engaging control, in certain conditions, users should be able to inspect, disclose, and modify the characters minds. To illustrate this idea, we will present a collaborative virtual environment called {\it Teatrix}, designed for children to build their own stories - fairy tales. In {\it Teatrix}, virtual actors play roles (such as: villain, hero, etc.) and may be controlled either by children or by the system. {\it Teatrix} allows children to go into the minds of the characters through a special tool named {\it “Hot Seating”}. {\it Teatrix} is already in use by children ages between 7 and 9 in the context of a Computer integrated Classroom (CiC) scenario installed in a school. The initial evaluations show that the use of the “Hot Seatin” tool is a fundamental element for children to feel in control of their characters and thus stay in character for their virtual performances.

One difficulty in creating synthetic characters for interactive stories is that these characters must convey their role in the story in a believable way. However, the relation between believability, on one side, and the role a character plays in a drama, on the other, has not yet been fully addressed. In this paper we will present a view on how to develop believable synthetic characters whose behaviour is based on a set of predefined functions (Propp's functions) associated with the role they play in the story. To illustrate the approach, we will present a collaborative virtual environment, Teatrix, designed for children to build their own stories-fairy tales. In Teatrix, virtual actors play roles (such as villain, hero, magician, etc), which are functional for the development of the story. Such roles have pre-defined goals and plans, allowing the story to flow and climax situations to arise. Teatrixis already in use by children ages between 7 and 9, in the context of a Computer-Integrated Classroom scenario.

This paper explores the concept of multiple perspectives to enhance collaboration by allowing remote participants to tailor their views, user-interfaces and roles to their particular needs and expertise. It describes a preliminary design study conducted on users of a collaborative CAVE-based virtual reality tool for visualizing occanographic data. Results will focus on the patterns of activity within this environment, in particular the manner in which participants transition between individual and group work during the course of a collaborative session.

This paper describes a collaborative virtual environment, Teatrix, developed with the aim of bringing drama activities into a virtual stage. Drama activities and story telling play important roles in children development. Based on this premise and also on real classroom activities, we developed Teatrix as a collaborative virtual environment, where both drama and story creation are merged into a unique medium providing a form of collaborative make-believe for children. In this paper we will focus on the design, architecture and preliminary results of Teatrix, as well as on the future steps of the research.