Crowded Collaborative Virtual Environments

We introduce a framework for supporting crowds of participants in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). The framework is realised as an extension to our previous spatial model of interaction and aims to provide greater scaleability and flexibility for communication between the inhabitants of virtual worlds. Our framework introduces an explicit crowd mechanism into CVEs in order to support the formation and activation of different kinds of crowd with different effects on mutual awareness and communication (achieved through the use of aggregation techniques combined with awareness adaptation). We present a demonstration application called the Arena - a shared space for staging on-line performances in front of a live audience. Keywords CSCW, Virtual Reality, Crowds

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, David Lloyd
• Keywords: CHI 1997, Collaborative Virtual Environments, Explicit Crowd Mechanism, Human Computer Interaction, Virtual