Experimenting with a Flexible Awareness Management Abstraction for Virtual Collaboration Spaces

The awareness management problem is still very far from solved. It is difficult to create an abstraction that’s flexible enough to be used in the wide range of applications that deal with Awareness management problems. This paper describes a generic object-oriented abstraction for the problem of awareness management in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). The described abstraction allows us to use different types of awareness information and awareness management policies. It is shown how the defined abstraction was applied to the conference table problem, what qualities where observed and how different variations of the same problem are solved using an incremental solution.