CVE'98
Provisional Programme
June 18th and 19th
Wednesday, June 17th Pre-conference workshop and events |
Thursday, June 18th CVE98 |
Friday, June 19th CVE98 |
Workshop System Aspects of Sharing a Virtual Reality Morning coffee will be served at 11am Lunch will be provided at 1pm. Afternoon tea will be served at 15.30pm Manchester University Celebrations These begin at 15.15pm. For those who are interested we are planning to book a retaurant for dinner in Manchester. We will be sending emails about this nearer the time. |
8.30-10
Registration 10.00 Keynote 11.00 Morning Coffee/Poster Presentations 11.30 Technical papers 13.00 Lunch
14.00 Technical papers 15.30 Afternoon tea/ Poster Presentations 16.00 Technical papers 17.30 End Dinner at Dalton Hall |
9.30
Technical papers 11.00 Morning Coffee/ Poster Presentations 11.30 Technical papers 13.00 Lunch
14.00 Technical papers 15.30 Afternoon tea/ Poster Presentations 16.00 Technical papers 17.30 Summary and Close |
Thursday June 18th: Keynote
Research Challenges for Systems Supporting Collaborative Virtual Environments
Adrian J. West and Roger
J. Hubbold
Advanced Interfaces Group
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
ABSTRACT
CVEs require appropriate software platforms upon which they can be constructed. In this presentation we review the current research challenges facing the provision of such facilities, covering three major fields:
Managing the interactions of multiple participants. One of the attractions of VEs is that they allow people to directly experience a shared environment, even when they are geographically separated. The challenges are to discover effective techniques for human interaction with the environments and with other participants. Such techniques must work in the face of network delays and the difficulties of achieving synchronisation. In addition, methods must be found of coping with the increasing demands for graphically and geometrically complex environments whilst maintaining adequate performance and perceptual continuity.
Describing behaviour. Virtual environments will only become truly effective when users can interact meaningfully with the objects and other participants within them. This requires ways to specify the behaviour and properties of those objects. With conventional tools and programming languages this is a laborious task, especially as the sophistication of the environments increase. The challenge is to find an appropriate framework and generic tools for specifying semantic behaviour thereby affording richer possibilities for interaction and engagement.
Providing a framework for the complete system. The integration of the necessary technologies to form a single, usable and coherent virtual reality system is itself a major challenge. Such a system must support concurrent processing across a range of machines, be able to exploit parallel processing, and should run `persistently' to allow applications and users to join and leave the environment dynamically. There are clear real-time performance demands that result in difficult design decisions which must be reconciled with the desire for a high-level applications interface. Approaching the same issue from a different direction, the need for coherency of experience, and thereby value of acquired skills, across a range of environments also suggests that some overall framework is required.
Technical program Thursday 18th June
Session 1
Offering Support and Sharing Information: A study of Empathy in a Bulletin Board Community Jennifer Preece (University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA)
Inter-Collaborative Virtual Environments Michel Soto Sébastien Allongue (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France)
Session 2
The OP2000 Medical Augmented Immersive Environment (MAIE) G. Bellaire, F. Hasenbrink, G. Graschew, M. Göbel, P.M. Schlag (Robert-Rössle-Klinik, Germany & GMD, Germany)
Hyperactive Jörn Bollmeyer (Universität-GH Paderborn, Germany)
Session 3
Social Conventions in Collaborative Virtual Environments Barbara Becker and Gloria Mark (GMD, Germany)
The Role of Obligation within Virtual Encounters Nic Earle, Colin Beardon (University of Plymouth, UK)
Technical Program: Friday 19th June
Session 4
A Virtual Environment Supporting Software Developers Ivan Tomek, Robin Nicholl, Rick Giles, Troy Saulnier, Jason Zwicker (Acadia University, Canada)
Envisaging Collaboration: Using Virtual Environments to Articulate Requirements James Pycock, Kevin Palfreyman, Jen Allanson, Graham Button (Xerox Research Centre Europe, UK & Lancaster University, UK).
Session 5
Bringing People and Places Together with Dual Augmentation Jennifer Mankoff, Jonathan Somers, Gregory Abowd (Georgia Tech, USA)
An Active Worlds interface to BSCW, to Enhance Chance Encounters Avon Huxor (Middlesex University, UK)
Session 6
A 3-D Interface for Cooperative Work Cédric Dumas, Grégory Saugis, Christophe Chaillou, Marie-Luce Viaud (LIFL, France & INA, France)
Nonverbal Communication Interface for Collaborative Virtual Environments Anthony Guye-Vuilleme, Tolga K. Capin, Igor Sunday Pandzic, Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, Daniel Thalmann (EPFL, Switzerland)
Session 7
Enabling Team Training in Virtual Environments Laurie McCarthy Randy Stiles, Lewis Johnson Jeff Rickel (Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, USA & USC Information Sciences Institute, USA)
Experiences with the Evaluation of CVE Applications Anthony Steed, Jolanda Tromp (UCL, UK & University of Nottingham, UK)
Poster Presentations
Lunchtime Discussion Session: Thursday 18th
Usability for VR interfaces
Jolanda Tromp1, Kulwinder Kaur2, Chris Hand3, Howell Istance4, Anthony Steed5.
University of Nottingham1, City University London
2, De Montfort University Leicester3,4, University College London5.jgt@cs.nott.ac.uk1, k.kaur@city.ac.uk2, cph@bcs.org.uk3 , hoi@dmu.ac.uk4, a.steed@cs.ucl.ac.uk5
Abstract
Virtual Environments (VEs) are a novel application area of computing technology, demanding an understanding of human-computer interaction and computer mediated human interaction in virtual spaces. Standard usability engineering and HCI evaluation techniques do not directly address the usability problems introduced by these new applications. The technology on which VEs are built is in its early stages, with in particular the human factors impact of its specific features still poorly explored (Durlach & Mavor, 1995), illustrated by the fact that significant usability problems with VEs have been found (Kaur, Maiden & Sutcliffe, 1998). To address this lack of VE specific usability tools, comprehensive guidelines for the design and evaluation of VEs have to be developed. Investigating the human behavioural aspects which affect performance and satisfaction in VEs, is a prerequisite of developing tools for VE usability-design and evaluation. It requires focused exploratory studies of the unique aspects and phenomena of VEs, embedded in a general framework of scientific inquiry (Groot, 1969). This will allow us to explore the usability issues introduced by VE specific problems with latency, 3D interaction, and realism. In order to achieve an understanding of these usability problems we must carry out investigative empirical work, such as analysis of representative VE user tasks, observations of user actions, develop and test VE presence-, interaction- and collaboration-models, and deduce usability requirements, culminating in an extension of existing HCI tools.
In order to create usable, scaleable VEs one has to work from the premise that there will always be a limit to available computing communications resources. Indeed, VE designers seem to work within two constraints, i) a human constraint: the VE has to be effective and intuitive, and ii) a machine constraint: the VE has to utilise minimum computational load and network traffic. The respective, conflicting solutions to satisfy these two constraints seem to be i) use of realistic representations and metaphors to allow users to transfer their everyday knowledge to the VE, and ii) simplification of these representations. As a result, the real challenge for VE usability researchers is to "prioritise specific user and application needs and then to find ways of supporting them within a limited computing resource" (Bowers, Pycock, O'Brien, 1996). Usability research seems to need to focus on VE usability trade-offs, such as between run-time performance and user performance; object representation and affordance representation; presence, co-presence and minimalist design; etc. Numerous researchers in the VR community have produced work in these areas. Combined into an overall meaningful structure these focused studies provide insight into the specific and unique features of VEs. We would like to open a discussion between VE usability researchers and VE usability designers on these and other usability topics in order to explore the commonalities of our respective research findings and frameworks of inquiry.
References
Bowers, J., Pycock, J., O'Brien, J., (1996). Talk and Embodiment in Collaborative Environments, in Proc. of ACM CHI’96, ACM Press.
Durlach, N.I., Mavor, A.S., (1995). Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges, National Research Council, National Academy Press, USA.
Groot, A.D., de, (1969). Methodology: foundations of inference and research in the behavioral sciences, Mouton & Co, Belgium.
Kaur, K., Maiden, N., Sutcliffe, A., (1998). Interacting with Virtual Environments: an evaluation of a model of interaction, to be published in: Interacting with Computers, Special Issue on VR.
For more information on these topics see http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/research/technologies/evaluation/
Lunchtime Discussion Session: Friday 19th
How to 'be there': the achievement of presence in electronic environments and some implications for the design of CVEs
Monika Buscher, Jon O'Brien and Jonathan Trevor
Lancaster University, UK
m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk
In this session we present results from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a multimedia art museum, where a number of shared electronic environments were made available to the public. Based on these observations we put forward a set of issues related to a sense of presence that emerge from our analysis. In particular, we argue that a sense of presence is not ‘split off’ from presence in the ‘real world’ but rather extended from the real to the virtual space, and that everyday practices of orientation, movement, and interaction are transposed in order to fit in with the affordances of the electronic environment. On the basis of our analysis we suggest that ‘realism’ of features in electronic environments in terms of both their behaviour and appearance is less critical than it is implied in some of the arguments currently put forward within the field.
Workshop: Wednesday 17th June
System Aspects of Sharing a Virtual Reality
Workshop Organizer: Michael V. Capps, MIT; Workshop Webpage: http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/sharedvr
This is the second incarnation of a successful workshop first held at WET-ICE '97 last June (see last year's web site). The workshop will be in the area of system support for shared virtual reality systems. Specifically, we note that while modeling, rendering, and display methods for graphical virtual worlds are highly popular areas which entertain many of their own conferences, there is often little focus in these venues on the systems aspects of these designs. However, much excellent research is being independently pioneered in the field of multi-user collaborative VR systems. CVE '98 promises to bring together professionals interested in collaboration in virtual worlds; this workshop provides a forum for the subset of that group actively designing the infrastructure to support such collaboration.
This will be a single-day workshop, so we will focus more on presentations and questions rather than discussion. This we hope will give attendees the opportunity to communicate about their current research. In the introduction, we will discuss the research areas outlined during the first workshop, at the closing of the day, we will discuss any significant improvements seen over the last year in those areas. Lunch will be provided.
For more details please consult the listed web page.
Manchester University Celebrations for June 17th 1998
The event is expected to start at about 15.15 on June 17th 1998, and will include:
Entrance to this Launch event is free to CVE'98 attendees.
Hallé Concert Program in the Bridgewater Hall
The concert given by the Hallé Orchestra in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the First Stored-Program Computer will be a program of English music, given as part of the Hallé Orchestra's Summer Prom season. The Britten and Vaughan-Williams pieces were written in the years just before 1948.
Please note: The price of tickets for people attending the University of Manchester Conferences will be Ł14.