A General Framework for Cooperative Manipulation in Virtual Environments

Whereas cooperation and collaboration have become two popular words in virtual reality, the problem of cooperative manipulation has been mainly left aside due to the great number of other challenges facing anyone trying to setup multi-user worlds. We define cooperative manipulation as a situation where two or more users interact on the same object in a concurrent but cooperative way. The focus of this paper is to describe an experiment whose goal was to experiment problems specific of cooperative manipulation setups. Those problems include synchronizing user’s input over the network, mapping user’s input into a meaningful 3-D movement thanks to what we call a model of activity and giving him relevant visual information. In this paper, we present a general framework able to take into account these problems.It is compatible with physically simulated objects and has been implemented using Java, VRML and a distributed approach.

[1]  Jean-Marc Jézéquel,et al.  A framework managing quality of service contracts in distributed applications , 1998, Proceedings. Technology of Object-Oriented Languages. TOOLS 26 (Cat. No.98EX176).

[2]  Wolfgang Broll,et al.  DWTP—an Internet protocol for shared virtual environments , 1998, VRML '98.

[3]  Michael Zyda,et al.  NPSNET:A Network Software Architecture for LargeScale Virtual Environments , 1994, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[4]  Steve Benford,et al.  MASSIVE: a collaborative virtual environment for teleconferencing , 1995, TCHI.

[5]  Andrew E. Johnson,et al.  CALVIN: an immersimedia design environment utilizing heterogeneous perspectives , 1996, Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems.

[6]  Christina Vasilakis,et al.  The NICE project: learning together in a virtual world , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE 1998 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (Cat. No.98CB36180).

[7]  Michael Benedikt,et al.  Cyberspace: First Steps , 1991 .

[8]  Wolfgang Broll.  Interacting in distributed collaborative virtual environments , 1995, Proceedings Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium '95.

[9]  Stéphane Donikian,et al.  General Animation and Simulation Platform , 1995 .

[10]  Jun Rekimoto,et al.  Virtual Society: extending the WWW to support a multi-user interactive shared 3D environment , 1995, VRML '95.

[11]  Wolfgang Broll.  Extending VRML to Support Collaborative Virtual Environments , 1996 .

[12]  Steve Benford,et al.  Awareness, Focus, and Aura: A Spatial Model of Interaction in Virtual Worlds , 1993, HCI.

[13]  F. R. Farmer,et al.  The lessons of Lucasfilm's habitat , 1991 .