Collaborative virtual environments in the year of the dragon

Abstract

Three suggestions are made for extensions from and to CVE's: awareness of others, multiple media, and scalability. Awareness of others and their activities is strongly desirable in all media and applications, not just in CVE's. Multiple media are not seriously catered for in existing CVE's, and a suitable architecture will precede popular applications. CVE's need to be scalable to greater numbers of people, and achieving this also has implications for greater flexibility and reconfigurability. With respect to awareness of others, we argue that the Web and most document handling applications are unaware of others in the workgroup or community, and this limits the ability to support real work practice. We present a Web application (CRACK!) that provides 'people-awareness' in the Web, between the Web and VR's, and that should be extensible to other standard document handling programs. With respect to multiple media, we argue that many media are needed for collaboration, since each has its own special benefits and affordances. We present a scalable architecture for handling multiple media (VR, video, audio, text, and documents). An important feature of the architecture is that the presentation level integration. With respect to scalability we note that upward scalability is important as it also gives a new ability to join, re-divide, and thus create new 'worlds'. We give an example of a novel dynamic partitioning algorithm to achieve upward scalability. We argue that 'downward' scalability to e.g. mobiles, and 'sideways scalability' to specialist e.g. audio or video devices is important in achieving multiple media CVE's. Taken together, these innovations may stimulate new generations of CVE's.