Building distributed virtual environments to support collaborative work
VRST '98 Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
The distributed studio: towards a theory of virtual place for creative collaboration
Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Designing for Habitus and Habitat
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Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can support interdisciplinary, heterogeneous geographically distributed creative teams. However research and commercial approaches to CVEs to support creative work have focused on implementation, paying little attention to the design of the virtual place that the system creates. Over the last ten years CVEs have moved out of the lab and into mass-market commercial deployment. Significant investment in virtual worlds (perhaps half a billion dollars in 2008 [3]) has seen technical advances, but the design of the virtual places has not advanced in a comparable manner. Just as in 1998, they still default to the Virtual Office, with avatars on chairs facing a virtual presentation screen. I am developing a set of design principles for virtual collaborative place, through a process of iterative design. In this process, five draft principles have been derived from existing theories of collaboration and creative place, and from exploratory ethnographic enquiries into real and virtual creative places [4]. The draft design principles are: 1. Support Reconfiguration, 2. Mix Realities, 3. Control Access, 4. Be A/Synchronous, 5. Transform Space into Inhabited Place. Now I am expressing the principles in prototypes which will be introduced into the environments of working distributed creative teams in a programme of action research.