How can live video be used, and used eeectively to represent remote users in a collaborative virtual environment? With today's high-end graphics workstations' video interfaces and computing power, processing and displaying live video at a real-time frame rate can be achieved. On the other hand, high-speed network which provides the bandwidth and speed necessary to transmit real-time frame rate ...

We assessed the e ects of network latency and jitter on a cooperative tele-operation task in a collaborative virtual environment. Two remote partners worked together to manipulate shared virtual objects over a network. The task was to minimize the time to transfer a ring through one of four paths with the least number of collisions. The performance of human subjects was measured and analyzed qu...

Mobile group dynamics (MGDs) assist synchronous working in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), and virtual time (VT) extends the benefits to asynchronous working. The present paper describes the implementation of MGDs (teleporting, awareness and multiple views) and VT (the utterances of 23 previous users were embedded in a CVE as conversation tags), and their evaluation using an urban pl...

The length and sheer scale of the current economic crisis has surprised managers, who were completely unprepared to deal with such an unanticipated situation. Standing at the heart of their businesses and providing a link between executives and employees, these managers need to limit the impact of the crisis in an environment in which various constraints, unexpected events and social tensions a...

Embodiment and subjectivity are important research issues for collaborative virtual environments. We claim that the direction and distance of an embodiment are the most important indicators of the relation between a user and surrounding objects or other users. In an objective view of a virtual environment, embodiment motion is unambiguous since all users will see all other users and all artifac...

Bearing in mind the difficulty required to create virtual environments, a platform for Setting-up Interactive Virtual Environments (pSIVE) was created to help non-specialists benefit from virtual applications involving virtual tours where users may interact with elements of the environment to extract contextual information. The platform allows creating virtual environments and setting up their ...

In this paper we discuss the usage of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) in educational settings. In particular we discuss the role that these systems can play in supporting learning communities. The focus of the paper is on the representation of space that underlies these systems. We present and compare different spatial metaphors presented in the literature and analyze how they support ...

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be classified into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of “being there” in the CVE yourself. Co-presence is having a feeling that one is in the same place as the other participants, and that one is collaborating with real people. In this paper we describe an experiment used to investigate the effects ...

Virtual Reality (VR) provides users advanced visualization and interaction technology for designing, analyzing and exploring complex data. To address the issue of noise in manufacturing environments, we developed a VR-supported method allowing users to explore noise behavior. This method consists of an implementation of acoustic simulation and visualization for both desktop and Cave Automatic V...