Cat's Cradle: Working with other people in overlapping real and virtual worlds through tangled strands of visual and other media

Experience of small and medium enterprises shows successful collaborative projects are a function of human and technical networking. Both would be enhanced by the provision of ‘virtual offices’ that allow for file sharing and for awareness of the presence and activities of others. An advanced Virtual Reality multi media and ‘virtual office’ project is described. Some new issues arise when combining file handling and exchange on the World Wide Web, Virtual Reality, video, audio. Technical issues concern the best local and transport architectures. The ability to change and switch between workgroup boundaries with multiple media raises inportant social, interface, and technical questions. One of these is the relation between the ‘spatial model’ and the ‘address model’ at the local and network architecture levels.