Team work in distributed collaborative virtual environments

Abstract

Today’s technology and advances in networking and telecommunications stimulate a change in the way everyday business is carried out, making it a globally distributed process, in which communication and collaboration of geographically dispersed groups is of vital importance. Virtual Environments are adapting accordingly, by providing not only a better man-machine interface, but also by facilitating human-to-human interaction and collaboration over distance. Therefore, new challenges are introduced in terms of distribution and interaction in Virtual Environments. It is not only a question of solving the technical problems of gathering and transmitting multimedia data streams with sufficient quality and speed, but also a question of addressing the specific needs of human communication and collaboration. The vision of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) is to provide distributed, collaborative teams with a virtual space where they can meet as if face-to-face, co-exist and collaborate while sharing and manipulating in real-time the virtual data of interest. The objective of this thesis is to provide the Virtual Environments research community with a thorough investigation of distributed, collaborative interaction between geographically dispersed teams using projection based Collaborative Virtual Environments.