The Virtual Mail System

Companies conduct world-wide collaborations which often involve asynchronous work with group members in di erent time-zones. In asynchronous work, the participants can easily waste days just clarifying questions because feedback is slow. For e cient collaborations, accurate \handing-o " of work between participants is crucial. Therefore, messages exchanged between collaborators should not contain ambiguities. One cause for ambiguity may be in the mismatch between the content domain and the medium used to convey the message regarding that domain. For example, if the task is to design buildings, the explanation of ideas usually involves the description of objects and features in a spatial context. This is di cult to accomplish even with advanced e-mail systems that allow the inclusion of pictures, animation and audio as attachments. In these systems, the e-mail messages are still detached from the environment in which they were initially recorded. In VR we have the opportunity to bridge this by allowing the same environment to be the medium over which a recording was originally created and played back. When a play-back involves the recording of the remote participant's virtual presence (an avatar) and actions, the avatar can be regarded as a surrogate of the original recorder of the message.