Managing mutual awareness in collaborative virtual environments

This paper introduces a spatial model of interaction which aims to support groups of people in using their natural communication skills in distributed virtual environments. First, we outline our motivation for undertaking this work in terms of the social significance of space in supporting co-operative work. Next, we summarise the model's main concepts, namely aura, awareness, focus, nimbus, adapters and boundaries. Following this, we describe routes to implementing the model. The first is an approach suited to realising the model as an application of existing VR platforms. The second is a general implementation of the model, based on its own specially tailored distributed architecture. Finally, we present our initial observations from use in the laboratory setting and outline issues for future work.2 1 To appear in Proceedings VRST'94, Singapore, August 1994, ACM Press. 2 This work has been funded under the European Commission's ESPRIT programme (the COMIC project) and by the UK's EPSRC.