Presence in a Distributed Virtual Environment for Cooperative Visualization

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) involve the use of a distributed architecture, and advanced interactive user interfaces to create a ‘shared’ s ense of space where users located in different physical locations can interact. An important objective is to provide users with an illusion that the machine mediated experience is not mediated. The extent of t his illusion is measured by the sense of ‘presence’ experienced. We explore ‘shared presence’ in a Cooperative Virtual Environment, that is providing the participants with a sense of presence of oth ers in the environment, thus having a feeling that they are directly cooperating with real people . We describe our prototype system for a ‘non-immersive’ distributed virtual environment. We prov ide preliminary results on factors which increase the sense of ‘shared presence’ in a virtual environ ment. These include the use of avatars to represent the participants, providing simple communica tion and interaction with the environment. Our prototype has served as a good basis for our future work to wards shared presence by highlighting areas that require attention, (such as providing communica tive behaviour to avatars) and indicating good prospects such as the importance of how one represents t h avatars.