COVEN: COllaborative Virtual ENvironments

COVEN is a four year (1995-1999) EC ACTS funded project focusing on the development of a computational service for teleworking and virtual presence. The overall objective of the project is to provide the facilities needed to support future cooperative teleworking systems. The project is a unique endeavour that brings together expertise on communications infrastructures; computer supported cooperative work; virtual reality (VR) and animation to provide support for a European wide distributed virtual environment (VE). This virtual environment will enable groups of geographically disparate users to work together by inhabiting common information spaces.

Trials

Nottingham are responsible for running the trial phase of COVEN where the applications which have been developed are used over wide area networks.

Last year saw us complete the first phase of trials using the applications developed within WP2 of the project. Five sites were involved in these initial trials, University College London, the University of Nottingham and Division Ltd in Bristol as UK representatives, and TNO-FEL in The Hague and KPN in Gronigen as Dutch representatives. The trials were run over ISDN. Both network and usability issues were examined during the trials and the results can be found in project deliverables (del3.4, del3.5).

The following Quicktime movies of the phase one trials are available:

The meeting room in the Business Application (2.6Mb) - video and audio
The Spreadsheet game (here we see the Brussels demo footage) (5.7Mb) - video and audio
The Citizen Application - the outer VTA room (1.4Mb) - video
The Citizen Application - the inner VTA room (2.1Mb) - video

This year, 1998, more trials will take place over a greater variety of networks, exploring issues of scale and evaluating techniques developed in the project which have been applied to the COVEN platform and applications.

ISDN Trials

We will build upon the five-site infrastructure put in place in the first trials phase and extend this to eight sites, adding Thomson, IIS and Lancaster. Information on the ISDN trials is available to project members here.

ATM Trials

The ATM trials are being coordinated by KPN Research. Initially this involves EPFL and Geneva undertaking trials using the ATM link between Geneva and Lausanne in parallel with internal tests between different sites at KPN. After initial testing these two groups will be joined together to provide a larger test network. Provisionally SICS and UCL will join in the later stages of these trials. For more details on the ATM trials see the KPN pages.

Heterogeneous IP Network Trials

These trials will use DIVE over the everyday networks which provide connectivity between the sites involved, Nottingham, SICS, Lancaster and UCL. In particular investigations will be made into the scaleability of the DIVE network multicast architecture. Our aim is to have 15 simultaneous, interacting, audio-aware participants in a single DIVE session. Information on the IP trials is available to project members here.

Evaluation

The focus of the combined usability activities is split up in three related threads, listed below. During the network trials exploratory studies of human behaviour is taking place. Results from these studies are reported on the main usability pages when they become publicly available.

Our mission statement: Since we are working in a new communication medium, we are trying to unearth CVE specific, usability and virtual environment design problems, solutions and techniques. Acceptable design solutions will have to satisfy two constraints. A human constraint: it has to be effective and intuitive, and a machine constraint: it has to utilise minimum computational load and network traffic.

Support

Funding:

COVEN is a four year (1995-1999) EC ACTS funded project

Partners:

Institution Public Project Pages Private Project Pages

Arax No No

Division Ltd

EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Yes Yes

Integrated Information Systems Ltd Yes Yes

KPN Research Yes

Lancaster University Yes Yes

Swedish Institute of Computer Science Yes Yes

Thomson-CSF, Laboratoire Central de Recherches Yes Yes

TNO Physics and Electronics Yes

University College London Yes Yes

University of Geneva, Mira Lab Yes Yes

University of Nottingham Yes Yes

Networked Demo of the Business application: at the "21st Century: the Communication Age" at the European Parliament in Brussels on June 18th 1997.
A quicktime movie of the Brussels demo (5.7Mb)

Publications

Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C., Lloyd, D. (1997): "Crowded Collaborative Virtual Environments", to be presented at ACM CHI'97.: pages 1-7: CHI97a.ps.gz
page 8 (colour plates): CHI97b.ps.gz
Benford, S. D., Brown, C. C., Reynard, G. T. and Greenhalgh, C. M (1996): "Shared Spaces: Transportation, Artificiality and Spatiality", Proc. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'96), Boston, pp. 77-86, ACM Press, Nov 16- 20, 1996.: CSCW96.ps.gz
Greenhalgh, C. (1996): "Dynamic, embodied multicast groups in MASSIVE-2", Technical Report NOTTCS-TR-96-8, Department of Computer Science, The University of Nottingham, UK.: NOTTCS-TR-96-8.ps.gz
Benford, S. D., Snowdon, D. N., Brown, C. C., Reynard, G. T., and Ingram, R. J. (1997): "Visualising and Populating the Web: Collaborative Virtual Environments for Browsing, Searching and Inhabiting Webspace", Proc. JENC'97 (8th Joint European Networking Conference), Edinburgh, UK, May 12-15th, 1997.
Snowdon, D. N., Greenhalgh, C., Benford, S. D., Bullock, A. and Brown, C. C. (1997): "A Review of Distributed Architectures for Networked Virtual Reality", to appear in Virtual Reality: Research, Development and Applications.: (abstract)
Greenhalgh, C. & Benford, S. D. (1997): ECMAST 97
Lloyd, D., Benford, S. D. and Greenhalgh, C. (1996): "DIS and Collaborative Virtual Environments", Presented at the 8th European Simulation Symposium conference, Genoa Italy October 1996.
Snowdon, D. N., Fahlén, L. and Stenius, M. (1996) "WWW3D: A 3D multi-user web browser", in WebNet'96 October 16-19, 1996, San Francisco, CA, USA

COVEN: COllaborative Virtual ENvironments

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