Using Collaborative Interactive Objects and Animation to Enable Dynamic Interactions in Collaborative Virtual Environments

This work introduces a new general object interaction scheme for dynamic collaborative virtual environments. The idea is to construct a world using only collaborative interactive objects that contain their own interaction information. As a result, the object interactions are application independent and only a single scheme is required to handle all interactions in the virtual world. Furthermore, we present a new and efficient way for human users to dynamically interact in the virtual world through their avatar. In particular, we show how inverse kinematics can be used to increase the interaction possibilities and realism in collaborative virtual environments. This will normally also result in a higher feeling of immersion for connected users. For both the collaborative interaction objects approach and the distribution of the dynamic avatar interactions, we try to keep the network load as low as possible. Finally, we demonstrate our techniques by incorporating them into the ALVIC framework.