Sharing and immersing applications in a 3D virtual inhabited world

In a remote computer-mediated collaboration, co-workers have a limited perception of each other: they loose the sense of immersion. To deal with this problem, some collaborative environments as NetMeeting [1] use videoconferencing. Leung [2] claims that these systems lack the sense of immersion because every participant sees others in separate windows and doesn't know who is acting. In order to improve the group perception, users can be represented as avatars in a 3D virtual world. The 2D application can be mapped in the 3D world and shared among users in distributed virtual environments. For example, VReng [3] uses VNC [4] to provide a virtual board on which 2D application is shown. Unfortunately, in VReng users actions on the 2D-interface application are not associated with avatars actions. Another problem is that the 2D interface is usually poorly viewed and manipulated in 3D worlds. To bypass this limitation, NetICE [5] allow user to leave temporarily the 3D interface to interact with the 2D application. We have developed a shared environment that allows direct manipulation of the 2D interface and where actions of users on the 2D application are reproduced by avatars in a 3D virtual inhabited world.