Broadcasting on-line social interaction as inhabited television

Inhabited TV combines collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) with broadcast TV so that on-line audiences can participate in TV shows within shared virtual worlds. Three early experiments with inhabited TV raised fundamental questions concerning the extent to which it is possible to establish fast-pace social interaction within a CVE and produce a coherent and engaging broadcast of this action. This paper presents a fourth more recent experiment, Out of This World that directly addressed these questions. We describe how the formulation of inhabited TV design principles, combined with the use of dedicated production software, for constraining and directing participants’ actions and for controlling virtual cameras, enabled us to create a fastmoving and coherent show. We conclude that our experiments to date demonstrate the technical feasibility of inhabited TV, but that greater attention needs to be paid to developing appropriate formats and content for this new medium before it becomes truly engaging. We also suggest that our real time production and camera software may be useful in other areas of CSCW.