Carpeno: interfacing remote collaborative virtual environments with table-top interaction

Modeling physiological and perceived responses in remote collaborative virtual environments: A comparative study of HMD and desktop platforms

This chapter reviews and compares the most promising collaborative virtual environment platforms, which have been used or proposed for supporting educational activities in terms of their potential to support collaborative e-learning. The most promising environment according to the results of this review is Second Life. Second Life is further examined by validating the platform’s features, philosophy and policies against some basic design principles for collaborative virtual learning environments in order to better assess its design adequacy for online learning. Furthermore, the chapter will present the features that the authors have implemented within the Second Life platform, in order to facilitate both the jigsaw and fishbowl collaborative e-learning techniques. Finally, the authors will present a case study concerning the evaluation of Second Life by undergraduate students in order to assess its potential to support these collaborative e-learning techniques.

The human inspector performing visual inspection of an aircraft is the backbone of the aircraft inspection process, a vital element in assuring safety and reliability of an air transportation system. Training is an effective strategy for improving their inspection performance. A drawback of present-day on-the-job (OJT) training provided to aircraft inspectors is the limited exposure to different defect types. Previous studies have shown offline feedback training using virtual reality (VR) simulators to be effective in improving visual inspection performance. This research aims at combining the advantages of VR technology that includes exposure to a wide variety of defects and the one-on-one tutoring approach of OJT by implementing a collaborative virtual training environment. In an immersive collaborative virtual environment (CVE), avatars are used to represent the co-participants. In a CVE, information of where the trainer is pointing can be provided to a trainee as visual deictic reference (VDR). This study evaluates the effectiveness of simulating on-the-job training in a CVE for aircraft inspection training, providing VDR slaved to a 3D mouse used by the trainer for pointing. The results of this study show that the training was effective in improving inspection performance.

A tension exists between designers' comfort with physical artifacts and the need for effective remote collaboration: physical objects live in one place. Previous research and technologies to support remote collaboration have focused on shared electronic media. Current technologies force distributed teams to choose between the physical tools they prefer and the electronic communication mechanisms available. We present Distributed Designers' Outpost, a remote collaboration system based on The Designers' Outpost, a collaborative web site design tool that employs physical Post-it notes as interaction primitives. We extended the system for synchronous remote collaboration and introduced two awareness mechanisms: transient ink input for gestures and a blue shadow of the remote collaborator for presence. We informally evaluated this system with six professional designers. Designers were excited by the prospect of physical remote collaboration but found some coordination challenges in the interaction with shared artifacts.

In this paper, we propose a collaborative product development and virtual prototyping framework based on distributed haptic interfaces along with the deformable object modeling. Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a promising technique in industrial product development and virtual prototyping for globalized manufacturing enterprises. Network control problems such as network delay have greatly limited CVE’s application. The problem becomes more difficult when high-update-rate haptic interfaces and computation-demanding deformable objects are both integrated into CVEs for intuitive manipulation and enhanced realism. A hybrid network architecture is presented to balance the computational burden of haptic rendering and deformable object simulation. An adaptive artificial time compensation is used to reduce the time discrepancy between the server and the client. Interpolation and extrapolation approaches are used to synchronize graphic and haptic data transmitted over the network. The proposed techniques can be used for collaborative product virtual prototyping, virtual assembly, remote surgical simulation and other collaborative virtual environments where both haptic interfaces and deformable object models are involved.

Nowadays, remote collaborative learning tools for computer science education mostly emphasize providing learning resources and realizing virtual collaborative learning environment for students. Many people in this field tend to have their mind fixed on the process improvement of such a collaboration as a whole, while few notice that individuals may have different roles and impacts on this type of teamwork. There usually is a “supervisor” on the team, who offers support to all members in the collaborative learning environment. However, such support may not always be as accessible as students demand it to be. Therefore, this paper describes a cloud-based tool to support software engineering practice courses in collaboration with remote tutors. This system utilizes a cloud storage platform to provide sharing of multimedia study materials and a better management of project developing cycles. A remote collaborative component called the Virtual Debug Laboratory is designed to improve and share students’ debugging experience in the same team. The most innovative feature of this system is that it amplifies the role of tutoring in remote collaborative learning environments so that tutors can, in real time, assist students in debugging during actual project developing and demonstrate step by step to the students the process of debugging. The results of the analyzed data regarding the use of this system indicate that the system can potentially enhance students’ abilities in project developing and debugging in software engineering practice courses. It is our hope that these preliminary data can provide a future reference for the software education community.

Remote collaboration has been studied for more than two decades and now there is the possibilities for new types of collaboration with the recent advances in immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR). However, despite the increasing research interest in remote collaboration study with VR/AR/MR technologies, there is still a lack of academic venues specifically focusing on VR/AR/MR remote collaboration research. This special issue provides high-quality papers on the topic of remote collaboration research and increases visibility of this timely interesting and important research area. We particularly focus on three research aspects in remote collaboration: (1) use of multimodal communication cues, (2) awareness of the task space, and (3) human factors understanding. In this editorial, we first describe five essential factors for remote collaboration: task, local user, remote user, communication, and tool/interface, and then summarize a brief history of the research areas. We also cover the feature papers accepted in this issue, which introduce novel multimodal interfaces for remote collaboration and the effects on task performance and perceptual factors. Finally, we discuss some potential future research directions while concluding the editorial.

The development of collaborative studies in learning has led to a renewed interest in the field of Web-based education. In this experimental study a highly interactive and collaborative virtual teaching environment has been created by supporting Moodle LMS with collaborative learning tool GREWPtool. The aim of this experimental study has been to find out the success rate of students when using an advanced and a standard collaborative tool in teaching programming languages over the Internet. The system has been tested with a total of 58 students whose aim was to learn the programming language Java. Success rate of students have been measured using two different assessments. Our results show a higher success rate when an LMS system is combined with an advanced collaborative tool during the teaching of programming languages in a Web-based environment.

Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) require the use of specially designed mechanisms that allow for a consistent sharing of state among involved users. These mechanisms must, somehow, compensate for network latency and losses in such a way that all players have a single, coherent perception of the system state. Common middleware platforms have difficulty in guaranteeing this consistency, and this is the prime reason why the main research topic for CVEs is the efficient, scalable and reliable transmission of state information. This paper presents a state transmission framework developed for a middleware platform that was constructed by the authors in an earlier project [1]. This middleware platform, Augmented Reliable Multicast CORBA Event Service (ARMS), which already supported several QoS adaptation mechanisms and reliable transmission in multicast environments, was extended with CVE-oriented state transmission mechanisms. After an identification of key requirements of collaborative virtual environments, the relevant features of the proposed state transmission framework are presented. This framework has been integrated in the ARMS platform and was subject to a series of performance tests whose results are included and discussed in this paper. The paper ends with a summary of contributions and an identification of guidelines for further workKeywordsState TransmissionTelecommunication ServiceDead ReckoningState MessageCollaborative Virtual EnvironmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The advancements in Mixed Reality (MR), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, and multi-scale collaborative virtual environments have led to new interface opportunities for remote collaboration. This paper explores a novel concept of flying telepresence for multi-scale mixed reality remote collaboration. This work could enable remote collaboration at a larger scale such as building construction. We conducted a user study with three experiments. The first experiment compared two interfaces, static and dynamic IPD, on simulator sickness and body size perception. The second experiment tested the user perception of a virtual object size under three levels of IPD and movement gain manipulation with a fixed eye height in a virtual environment having reduced or rich visual cues. Our last experiment investigated the participant's body size perception for two levels of manipulation of the IPDs and heights using stereo video footage to simulate a flying telepresence experience. The studies found that manipulating IPDs and eye height influenced the user's size perception. We present our findings and share the recommendations for designing a multi-scale MR flying telepresence interface.

Collaborative virtual environments (C-VE) facilitate team-oriented training on virtual reality-based surgical simulators. Many C-VEs replicate the VE on each user's machine to allow for real-time interactions. However, this solution does not work well when modifying voxel-based C-VEs because large and frequent volumetric updates make it difficult to synchronize the C-VE. This paper describes a hybrid depth-buffered image (DBI) and geometry-based rendering method created to simulate visual interactions between local virtual bone cutting tools and remotely maintained volumetric bone material for a craniotomy simulator. For real-time interactions, users only store a DBI of the volumetric C-VE and composite it with rendered images of surgical tools. Additionally, we describe methods to combat network bandwidth/latency to remotely simulate haptic and bone drilling interactions between users' tools and the volumetric VE. For haptic feedback, a multi-rate solution (Cavusoglu and Tendick, 2000) allows users to construct a local approximation of the volumetric C-VE to compute new forces. Only 2D DBI updates are required to synchronize different users when the bone changes due to drilling. Our approach provides an improved performance over a replicated VE that uses 3D model-based updates

Rapid advances in networking technology in the past decade have offered the potential of achieving real‐time collaborative applications via network connections, in which people are able to interact with each other and the virtual surrounding environment in a way that they experience in real life. Collaboration is part of basic communication form in human society. If a virtual environment or a cyberspace is connected by computer network to allow real‐time sharing and exchanging of information by multiple users, efficient remote collaboration can be realized. Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) has been developed for such purposes. With the capability to support multiple geographically dispersed human‐to‐human and human‐to‐machine communication and interaction in a shared virtual environment, CVE opens a door to a broader spectrum of potential applications in various areas ranging from academic study to collaborative engineering to military war‐game simulation applications. In this article, we discuss the CVE applications in the following four main categories: military applications, social interaction and entertainment, collaborative learning, and collaborative design and group work.

This chapter addresses one of the challenges the collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) research community faces which is the lack of a systematic approach to study social interaction in CVEs, determine requirements for CVE systems design, and inform the CVE systems design. It does this by presenting a method for studying multi-user systems in an educational context. The method has been developed as part of the Senet project, which is investigating the use of virtual actors in CVEs for learning. Groupware prototypes are studied in order to identify requirements and design factors for CVEs. The method adopts a rigorous approach for organizing experimental settings, collecting and analysing data, and informing CVE systems design. The analysis part of the method shares many of the Interaction Analysis foci and expands on it by providing a grid-based method of transforming rich qualitative data in a quantitative form. The outcome of this analysis is used for the derivation of design guidelines that can inform the construction of CVEs for learning. The method is described by a third phase of work in the Senet project.

Negotiations between three or more parties are more complex than dyadic negotiations concerning the integration of various interests. In this study, we investigated negotiation in a collaborative virtual environment. We focused specifically on communication channels and their impact on negotiation in three-person groups. Three conditions of media richness were varied in the collaborative virtual environment: text chat, audio channel, and a combination of both. Furthermore, various nonverbal signals and a function for taking notes were available to the participants in every condition. The results show that participants in the conditions with audio channel and with audio channel and text chat are more satisfied with the communication process and need less time to find a solution. The quality of the negotiated result does not differ between the conditions. Adding text chat to the audio channel does not enhance the potential of solving negotiation problems. Audio-based communication seems to meet the requirements of negotiating better than text chat in terms of a more satisfying and faster communication process.

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) such as massive multi-user 3D games and military training environments can place strict requirements on network when participating users are sharing the 3D virtual environment through mobile devices in an ad-hoc network. This paper presents an optimization mechanism for Gnutella network to better meet the mobility and the network requirements of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). With the rapidly increasing use of mobile personal devices, we are facing new challenges and opportunities for making efficient mobile collaborative virtual environments (MCVEs) applications based on Gnutella network. The proposed work comprises an enhancement of the Gnutella network through an efficient overlay formation protocol, and a novel caching optimization technique implemented in specific nodes selected through a Gnutella Ultrapeer system (GUS) mechanism. The resulting approach should overcome several problems including flooding and the limited capacity of mobile devices. In order to evaluate our designed protocols, we run the system over several ad-hoc routing protocols, simulation results shows that each ad-hoc routing protocol performs well only under specific simulation scenarios.