Staging a Public Poetry Performance in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

We discuss the design of a CVE poetry performance and experiences arising from staging it to two hundred members of the public. The design, a collaborative effort between computer scientists, artists, poets and producers, addresses issues of. virtual world structure; embodiment of performers and audience; navigation interfaces; temporal structure of the event; and mixed reality presentation Experiences include virtual audience members often ignoring the poets and conflicting attitudes towards embodiment New CVE design possibilities are proposed, including object centred interaction, context sensitive interaction and tools to define and manage the spatial and temporal structure of events.