Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Spaces and Places for CSCW: An Introduction

In the late 1980s Virtual Reality (VR) burst onto the public stage propelled by a wave of media interest and related science fiction novels such as Neuromancer by William Gibson (Gibson, 1989). VR promised to revolutionize the way in which we experience and interact with computers, and research into the field mushroomed. More recently, the hype surrounding VR has died down and, although it is receiving less public attention, serious work is continuing with the aim of producing useful and usable technology. At the centre of current work related to VR is the field of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). This field has as its goal the provision of new, more effective means of using computers as tools for communication and information sharing with others. Many CVE systems have been constructed. Some of these are desktop systems and applications; but large public virtual spaces have also been constructed (such as Alpha World at http://www.activeworlds.com/; see Chapter 15). CVEs are also being used to experiment with new forms of art and interactive television (Benford et al., 1997a,b; Benford et al, 2000a).

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