Interactive Realities: A Tutorial on Multi-Modal, Collaborative Virtual Reality

In the field of virtual reality, there is much attention to the notion of multi-modal environments. These environments use various senses of the human body to achieve an overall immersion in the environment leading to an increased sense of presence. In addition, there is much work in collaborative architectures allowing users to interact with each other and the world itself. This tutorial introduces the topic of software infrastructures for collaborative, multi-modal environments and then surveys the work and progress in this area. Within multi-modal environments, most applications have covered both the visual and auditory senses. However, it has only been in recent years that research has progressed in the haptic and olfactory areas. A software infrastructure for multi-modal environments should address all the senses, and research testbeds fulfilling this requirement are beginning to appear. Adding collaboration within the environment requires addressing aspects of its own. All these multi-modal and collaborative issues are discussed and existing research testbeds are surveyed. By putting multi-modal environments together with collaborative environments, the goal of an immersive, presence-grabbing environment will be met.