Virtual body language: providing appropriate user interfaces in collaborative virtual environments

A longitudinal study of MASSIVE-l, a desktop virtual conferencing system revealed that users required some higher level navigation and interaction abilities than currently provided. This paper presents some of the results of this study in terms of the sort of facilities required by users. It describes how the context of use affects the choice of appropriate user interfaces for VR and then proposes a general architecture which could be incorporated into collaborative virtual environment software to automatically select appropriate user interface components for users in a user extensible way.