Virtual reality on a WIM: interactive worlds in miniature
CHI '95 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Formations: explicit group support in collaborative virtual environments
Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
Supporting Transcontinental Collaborative Work in Persistent Virtual Environments
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Introducing third party objects into the spatial model of interaction
ECSCW'97 Proceedings of the fifth conference on European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
The Simple Virtual Environment Library: An Extensible Framework for Building VE Applications
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
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Virtual reality technology is increasingly being applied to globally distributed teams engaged in collaborative product design. Observations of product design teams have suggested at least four distinct modes of collaboration-complementary, competitive, peer-to-peer, and leader-follower. Another insight from observation is that collaboration consists of fluid transitions between these modes in the accomplishment completion of the design task, driven by a flexible process of subgrouping and regrouping which reflects the structure and progress of the task. Yet most collaborative virtual environment systems support only one mode of collaboration-peer-to-peer-and those that do explicitly support multiple modes (or even individual roles) do not allow fluid transitions between them in the context of the same task. In addition, no explicit support is provided to allow subgroups to be formed and dissolved. To address this problem, a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) for product design that supports multiple collaboration modes and fluid transitions is proposed; two metaphors for collaborative product design (collaboration tree and infinitely recursive conference room) are introduced; the use of a collaboration tree interface widget is detailed; and the Simple Shared Virtual Environment (SSVE) toolkit for collaborative virtual environments is described.