A Survey of Collaborative Virtual Environment Technologies

What viable technologies exist to enable the development of so-called desktop virtual reality (desktop-VR) applications? Specifically, which of these are active and capable of helping us to engineer a multi-user, collaborative, virtual environment (CVE)? An examination of the literature and numerous project websites indicates an array of both overlapping and disparate approaches to this problem. In this survey, we review and perform a risk assessment of 16 prominent desktopVR technologies (some building-blocks, some entire platforms) in an effort to determine the most efficacious tool or tools for constructing a CVE.