Software Support for a Virtual Planning Room

Computer supported cooperative work depends on conventional personal productivity tools and on the ability of the system to provide e ective means for various members involved in the work to interact with one another. The interaction mechanismmay be formalized through operations on shared information, through strict message-passing protocols, or by providing a means by which the human users can interact with one another through conventional conversation. Desktop virtual environment technology can be used to create group human-computer interface in which di erent users on di erent computers interact with common virtual artifacts, and with representations of one another using pointing devices, keyboards, and bitmapped screens. Virtual environments place tremendous demands on bandwidth for data movement, extensive graphics, data stream synchronization, and frequent interactions among object representations of the artifacts and virtual users. This paper describes our organization of an experimental virtual environment, called the Virtual Planning Room.