This chapter provides an overview of the technical and social issues of CVEs and their impact on designers. The development of CVEs has lead to new ways for designers to collaborate and new kinds of places for designers to design. As a new technology for collaborative design, CVEs impact the collaborative process by facilitating movement between working together and working individually. As new...

This paper aims to analyse if virtual forums set up in an environment specifically designed to improve collaborative learning can effectively influence students’ discourse quality and learning when compared with those forums set up in a general environment. Following a coding schema based upon the set of scaffolds offered in the Knowledge Forum environment, we have qualitatively analysed 60 for...

The growing need for communication, visualization and organization technologies in the field of e-learning environments has led to the application of virtual reality and the use of collaborative virtual environments. This paper presents a system architecture to support such environments, defined by user needs and using state of the art technologies.

Mobile Group Dynamics (MGDs) are a suite of techniques that help people work together in large-scale collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). The present paper describes the implementation and evaluation of three additional MGDs techniques (teleporting, awareness and multiple views) which, when combined, produced a 4 times increase in the amount that participants communicated in a CVE and als...

This paper discusses the usage of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) as a repository of virtual places, serving as a community memory. Place is important for human memory and for social life of a learning community. Virtual places have the advantage of flexible creation and modification and therefore can be used for capturing and storing histories and activities in a learning community. ...

In market research, the adoption of interactive virtual reality-techniques could be expected to contain many advantages: artificial lab environments could be designed in a more realistic manner and the consideration of “time to the market”-factors could be improved. On the other hand, with an increasing degree of presence and the notional attendance in a simulated test environment, the market r...

Virtual collaborative environment are 3D shared spaces in which people can work together. To collaborate through these systems, users must have a shared comprehension of the environment. The objective of this experimental study was to determine if visual stable landmarks improve the construction of a common representation of the virtual environment and thus facilitate collaboration. This seems ...

This paper explores issues relating to the use of broadcast media such as speech and gesture for interacting with non-human (i.e. application) objects in collaborative virtual environments. These issues arise from a recognition that broadcast media such as these are inherently social in nature and that, in order to join in such media, an object should possess a degree of social awareness. Put i...

Collaborative virtual environments for desktop PCs. are inherently interesting to use and to develop, and provide motivating and challenging capstone projects for capable students to undertake. From an educational perspective, collaboration in virtual three-dimensional spaces using avatars also adds some interesting dimensions to student learning. This paper reports upon a series of development...

The main goal of this paper is to facilitate educational designers and developers by providing a point of reference for making decisions on how to incorporate 3D environments into the applications they develop as well as for extending their capabilities by integrating more functionality. Therefore, this paper presents the design principles for virtual spaces, which aim at supporting multi-user ...