A social metaphor-based 3D virtual environment

Our design goal for OnLive Traveler was to develop a virtual community system that emulates natural social paradigms, allowing the participants to sense a tele-presence, the subjective sensation that remote users are actually co-located within a virtual space. Once this level of immersive "sense of presence" and engagement is achieved, we believe an enhanced level of socialization, learning, and communication are achievable. OnLive Traveler is a client-server application allowing realtime synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multipoint, full duplex voice, managed by the server. We examine a number of very specific design and implementation decisions that were made to achieve this goal within platform constraints. We also will detail some observed results gleaned from the virt...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: Steve DiPaola, David Collins
• Keywords: OnLive Traveler, SIGGRAPH 2003, Traveler Client Interface, Virtual Community