Getting the picture: Enhancing avatar representations in collaborative virtual environments

Virtual Worlds for 3D Visualizations

This paper presents an analysis and discussion of visual information representations in multi-user avatar-based 3D virtual worlds. We discuss benefits and issues of such environments for displaying scientific and information visualizations. In comparison to traditional two-dimensional representation forms, virtual worlds can be used to display more dimensions of information and illustrate data ...

Using Collaborative Interactive Objects and Animation to Enable Dynamic Interactions in Collaborative Virtual Environments

This work introduces a new general object interaction scheme for dynamic collaborative virtual environments. The idea is to construct a world using only collaborative interactive objects that contain their own interaction information. As a result, the object interactions are application independent and only a single scheme is required to handle all interactions in the virtual world. Furthermore...

The Emotional Avatar: Non-verbal Communication Between Inhabitants of Collaborative Virtual Environments

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are distributed virtual reality systems with multi-user access. Each inhabitant is represented by a humanoid embodiment, an avatar, making them virtually present in the artificial world. This paper investigates how inhabitants of these CVEs can communicate with each other through channels other than speech, and it is primarily concerned with the visuali...

Emotionally expressive avatars for collaborative virtual environments

Social Presence and Interpersonal Trust in Avatar-Based, Collaborative Net- Communications

The paper deals with social presence effects of embodiment in collaborative net-communications. Social presence was measured by an extended questionnaire including an item set on emotional closeness of the partners. Principal component analysis revealed a consistent structure with the five dimensions: copresence, closeness, comprehension, contagion and coordination. In addition a measure for in...