CVE'96: Workshop Report

Introduction

Dr. Steve Benford from Nottingham University gave a short talk introducing Collaborative Virtual Environments and highlighting some of the current challenges and research issues.

Using Usage Data in Collaborative Information Environments

Mathew Chalmers (UBILAB, Switzerland) presented work on collaborative information visualization. He discussed some of his recent work on BEAD to add legibility features and support multiple users. The talk also highlighted some of the issues and challenges currently facing information visualization such as the problems of artifacts occluding other artifacts and the need to reduce clutter and reveal structure.

"Just because something is on the screen, does not mean its visible"

[Bryce Allen]

A Collaborative Environment for Role-Playing in Object Space

Chris Hand (De Montfort University, UK) highlighted some problems with the CRC Cards technqiue for evaluating software designs. He then presented CRCMOO a MOO designed to support a group of people performing a CRC Cards design evaluation.

Virtual Administration: Providing a DIVE VR interface to POLITeam

POLITeam is a groupware system which allows German government administrators to cooperate with each other remotely. David England (GMD, Germany) described how DIVE (together with some Tcl scripts) and VRML was used to generate "virtual offices" contain representations of the documents available via POLITeam.

A Shared Virtual Environment for Architectural Design Review

Jon Mandeville (HIT lab, USA) was unable to attend CVE'96, so Mark Billinghurst (HIT lab, USA) presented this paper which focussed on the Greenspace project at the HIT lab. Greenspace 1 was a virtual environment with fours users, two in Seattle and two in Tokyo. The aim was to collaboratively herd a crowd of creatures. Real-time audio communication was provided and video of the users head was textured onto their representation in the VE. However, Greenspace 1 was based on specially written software rather than a general purpose environment. The aim of Greenspace 2 is to produce a general purpose virtual environment that can be used for many applications. The second part of the talk focussed on the design of Greenspace 2 and demonstrated it being used to conduct multi-user architectural design reviews.

Shared Space: An Augmented Reality Interface for Computer Supported Collaborative Work

Mark Billinghurst (HIT lab, USA) discussed the use of Collaborative Augmented Reality; such systems represent a shift from human-computer interaction (HCI) to human-human interaction mediated by computers. This work takes the view of Ishii & Miyake that "No new piece of technology should block the use of existing tools and methods". Shared space is an augmented reality system that allows multiple users to collaborate on the same task. Mark presented several games using Shared Space which were designed to investigate how effective Shared Space was at supporting collaboration and interaction between two users.

"Studierstube" - An Environment for Collaboration in Augmented Reality

Dieter Schmalstieg (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) presented "Studierstube" an augmented reality for performing science related collaboration. The system is designed to suppor people working together and does not affect normal interaction. Because the system depends on augmenting a real environment it is not possible to collaborate with geographically remote users. Dieter desribed an application using "Studierstube" for scientific visualisation. He also described a novel interaction device, the Personal Interaction Panel (PIP) - a tracked flat panel together with a tracked pen. Virtual objects could be overlaid on the panel. Users can then move the panel to manipulate the object. Another use for PIP is for handling menus, users can use the pen to select menu items "attached" to the panel. Since the pen and panel are physical objects the user gets tactile feedback when the pen touches the panel to make a selection.

A Conversational Agent to Help Navigation and Collaboration in Virtual Worlds

Pierre Nugues (ISMRA, France) presented Ulysse a conversational agent embedded within the SICS DIVE virtual environment. Ulysse aids the user in navigating through the virtual environment by recognising spoken commands such as "move me to the red house". When moving the user Ulysse attempts to navigate around obstacles and detect collisions between the user's embodiment and artifacts in the Virtual Environment. Ulysse can also be told to manipulate artifacts in the virtual environment.

Extending VRML to Support Collaborative Virtual Environments

Wolfgang Broll discussed his extensions to VRML to support multiple users. His approach uses a combination of and tcp/ip to distribute VRML worlds and multicast to transmit event notifications. This approach divides artifact behaviour into several catagories each of which is supported by different mechnanisms to provide the best compromise between consistency and interactivity.

A Concurrency Control Model for the Real-time Interactive Shared Virtual Environment

UnJae Sung (KAIST, Korea) described several VR applications developed at KAIST: Landscape a 3D VRML/wen browser, Sarah an architectural walkthrough with a Tcl/Tk API and VRAT a collaborative VE authoring tool. The main focus of the talk was VRAT and the concurrency contro, model used to enable several users to manipulate the same artifact simultaneously.

Supporting Awareness in Shared Workspaces using Relevance-dependent Event Notifications

Uwe Rauschenbach (University of Rostock, Germany) presented some techniques for notifiying users of the Linkworks(tm) groupware system of events occuring as the result of actions of other users. Several different techniques are used to inform users of events depending on the relevance to the event to the user and the user's current activity. A single event may generate multiple (different) notifications to several users and the user can interact with the event to obtain more information.

Drama as a Metaphor for Design of Situated, Collaborative Distributed Learning

Annita Fjuk (University of Oslo, Norway) & Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen (University of Aalborg, Denmark) gave a talk discussing the complexity of designing distributed collaborative learning. They presented three case studies which used different media, differing numbers of participants and different subject areas and discussed the experience gained from these case studies. They then discussed how drama could be used as a metaphor to aid the design of collaborative learning experiences.

Interacting with people and objects in Virtual Environments Metaphors for User Centered Design

Mirco Bolzoni (University of Padova, Italy) talked about the use of metaphors in collaborative virtual environments. Metaphors have the potential to bridge the gap between abstract and concreate information. He presented the results of a study which asked both users and designers to produce metaphors for interacting in a VE. The users produced 70% of the metaphors which may have been because of their need to interpret what the software was doing. A problem with the use of metaphors is that the attribution of meaning is culturally and socially mediated.

Interactive Collaborative Media Environments

Jerry Bowskill & Doug Traill (BT, UK) presented an overview of some work virtual environments work that BT is involved with and described experiences with BT's VisionDome (currently installed at BT Laboratories, Martlesham Heath).

Collaborative Interactive Design in Virtual Environments

Tomas Axling argued that most work in a collaborative virtual environment involves creating or changing some artifacts according to some rules. He discussed his work on a general purpose configuration engine called OBELICS. He then gave an example application which used OBELICS to create an agent for configuring journeys which would find the best choice of flight, location, hotel etc depending on constraints imposed by the user. This application used SICS DIVE to provide the virtual environment within which the agent represented its user interface. Tomas also described some other speech controlled agents that he has developed which have various specialist skills and can be commanded by the user to manipulate artifacts in the virtual environment.

An Organisational perspective on Collaborative Virtual Environments

Helen Walker (University of Bath, UK) presented the results of some research investigating how the use of CVEs might be shaped by and impact on an organisation. As part of this work Helen conducted 97 interviews with people from 14 sites in 7 countries. The work highlighted the need for CVEs to take into account the way people work and the structure of the user organisation.

Technology for Collaborative Virtual Environments

Michael Rygol (Division, UK) presented a description of Divsions dVS/dVISE software. He also discussed the experience gained by Division after conducting several multi-site trials using ISDN and the internet. They found that while ISDN gave acceptable performance, the internet was not currently practical for using dVS between sites. Michael also mentioned some of the technical fixes made to dVS to improve performance over WANs and showed some video clips from the trials.

Posters

Social Events

On the 18th September the organisers and delegates went for a meal at Nottingham's Mohgul E Azam Tandoori restaurant followed by a trip to a nearby pub, the Limelight, for few drinks. Here, many a local brew was sampled.

The workshop meal took place on the 19th September in the main hall of the Cripps Hall of residence.

Feedback

Generally, the attendees were very positive about CVE'96 - in fact feedback was so postive that although CVE'96 had initially been planned as a `one off' event there are currently plans to stage CVE'98.

More specific comments were:

• "Very interesting workshop!"
• "I enjoyed the event very much and look forward to meeting up with many of the delegates in the future."
• "I really much appreciated the all event. It was both very friendly and interesting."
• "The organisers achieved a remarkably wide range of high quality contributors. A remarkable contrast to the more common tired conferences which occur in some other areas."
• "I enjoyed very much to have people with different backgrounds in the area of CVE. It is important to keep such an event (in the future) open for technical aspects as well for social or psychological aspects."

And one final interesting suggestion from the feedback questionnaire: "How about a virtual conference?"

"Hmmmm......Ever tried virtual beer?""

(Ed.)

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank a number of people who helped out at the conference. Firstly, Steve Benford and CRG for underwriting the costs of the conference. Also, the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham for allowing us to host the event within the department.

Many thanks are due to the programme committee for their hard work in reviewing the submissions for CVE'96. Thanks to Jolanda Tromp for producing the feedback questionaires and facilitating contacts between Psychology and Computer Science.

Last, but not least, the student volunteers: Dave Golightly, Jeni Tennison and Chris Fishwick. Thanks also to Jolanda Tromp and Paul Bateman for designing the CVE logo.