Shared Simple Virtual Environment: An Object-Oriented Framework for Highly Interactive Group Collaboration

  • Authors:
  • John M. Linebarger;Christopher D. Janneck;G. Drew Kessler

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • DS-RT '03 Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Shared Simple Virtual Environment (SSVE) is an object-oriented software framework designed for object-focused small group collaboration in highly dynamic virtual environments. Comparedto most other collaborative virtual environment systems, SSVE allows a team of six to eight people to collaborate closely on a highly interactive model construction task. SSVE is a "multi-multi" framework驴 multi-user, multi-threaded, multi-platform, and multi-modal. Numerous interaction, awareness and collaboration mechanisms are provided by theramework and by applications that use the framework, including "what you see is what I see," deictic references, and exclusive object access. Several concurrency control mechanisms are also supported through the framework, including those suitable for closely-coupled synchronous collaboration in highly dynamic virtual worlds. In addition, support is provided for emergent group collaboration modes, and a novel user interface widget, the collaboration tree, is introduced to facilitate subgroup formation and integration of task results. In short, SSVE is a framework for the development of applications which explore group collaboration mechanisms in highly-interactive shared virtual environments. A small pilot study that used the framework tovalidate the utility and stability of the framework, as well as to investigate larger issues of group collaboration, is also presented.