Collaborative Work in Virtual Environments

Kai-Mikael Jää-Aro
Interaction and Presentation Laboratory
Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science
Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm
Sweden

What are Virtual Environments?

The popular view: Immersive virtual environments


Mårten Stenius at the Interaction and Presentation Laboratory, wearing a Virtual Research Flight Helmet stereoscopic head-mounted display and wielding an Ascension Technology Flying Mouse. In the background is the console of an SGI Onyx VTX driving the display.

Projection-based virtual environments


The CAVE environment has been designed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The CAVE projects stereoscopic images on the walls of a cube, large enough for several people to stand inside.

Screen based virtual environments


3D stereoscopic pictures can also be generated on an ordinary workstation screen. The stereo effect can be produced in many ways, but a fairly standard method is using CrystalEyes LCD shutter glasses, which allow allow one eye at at time to see the alternating left- and right-eye views that give a 3D impression. This can be combined with head-tracking to give the ability to look around objects.

Multi-spectator virtual environments

Several people can experience the environment, but only one person can actually interact with it

Multi-user virtual environments

Several users can concurrently be present in and interact with the virtual environment

Networked virtual environments

Several users distributed over a network can participate in a common virtual environment.

What is Computer-Supported Cooperative Work?

Very little work is actually done by single persons, but rather by smaller (e g design teams) or larger (entire corporations) groups.

It should be possible to support the cooperation within these groups. This is the goal of CSCW.

Why use Virtual Environments for CSCW?

Virtual environments are presumably a Good Thing, since they give us:

Teleconferencing

A necessary function for most CSCW activities is communication with co-workers.


A phone booth in the DIVE environment, created by Emmanuel Frécon.

A text-based 'talk'-window is even in the presence of better communication channels a useful backup and good for indicating file names and the like.

Audio communication is natural, immediate and hands off.

Video communication gives facial expressions of participants.

Teleconferencing in Virtual Environments

Ordinary teleconferences suffer from a lack of spatial cues. Virtual environments can add
A conferencing environment created in DIVE. The environment is embellished with texture maps and local lighting models.

Shared artifacts

Applications can be represented in the virtual environment and used concurrently or alternatingly by the participants.


Two virtual bodies in a DIVE model of the atrium at Electrum. Between them stands a whiteboard application on which all participants can draw.

Embodiments

User representations in the virtual environment indicate
Conferencing participants gathered around a table in the MASSIVE system. Embodiments with ears indicate users with audio capability, those with Ts embossed in their faces are limited to a text-only client with graphics capability. The "owner" of the supine embodiment has probably left his workstation in the real world and indicated this by lying down.

The Spatial Model

The spatial model gives support for direction of attention, public addressing and private conversations using as close to normal body language as possible. The spatial model was first tested in DIVE. MASSIVE was built specifically to test the spatial model for collaboration.

We define a set of subspaces around the user's embodiment, a pair for each sensory modality. The focus defines the extent of the user's attention. The nimbus defines the extent of the user's presence in the world. The focus and nimbus are enveloped by the aura. When one user's focus intersects another user's nimbus the first becomes aware of the second.


Two users are surrounded by their auræ which have just collided. Awareness calculations are performed and the users' views and hearing of each other is adjusted.

The environment may contain aura modifiers or adaptor objects that enhance or shape the user's aura.


The conference table is an aura modifier that folds in the auræ of all those around the table so that they can hear and speak to each other regardless of the actual shape and size of their individual auræ.

Populated Information Terrains

PITs are information retrieval applications in which the users are aware of each other's presence and activity. Information is laid out in 3-space and use shape and colouring to aid in organisation and search. Current applications include VR-VIBE and QPITs.


A visualisation of 1500 bibliographical references, laid out in space according to their affinity to the keywords placed at the nodes of the pyramid.

Shared Editing and Design

Preliminary results show that concurrent collaborative editing can be very efficient, at least for some tasks.


A collaborative 3D graph editor, created by Rolf Staflin in DIVE. The graph being edited is a state machine representation of a communications protocol. In front is a set of buttons for actions on the objects in the display.


A collaborative 3D modeller created by Mårten Stenius in DIVE. At the bottom is a tool menu for creating objects in the environment, at the top right is an indicator of the position and orientation of the selcted object (the cone with yellow markers). At the right is a skeleton showing the hierarchical organisation of the compong object being created. (No, I do not know what it is.)

Monitoring and Control

Still unproven value, but the hope is to utilise some kind of VE technology for e g process control.


A design for a factory monitoring application, created by Worldesign, Inc.


A LAN monitoring application created by Kai-Mikael Jää-Aro in DIVE. Visible is a number of workstations and a printer, their colour indicating their current system load.

Subjective Representations

The different participants do not necessarily have to see their environment in the same way. How they are going to be able to communicate sensibly if they see different things is still unsolved.


The Greenspace project, teleconferencing in a virtual environment, jointly undertaken by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, in Seattle, Washington and Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. On the left is a view from the US end of the conversation and on the right is a view from the Japanese end.

European Research

Projects

Organisations