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...

Social interaction is a key driving force behind any team activity. Real time closely coupled interaction where we quickly see the effect of our actions on others is an important feature of social interaction. For example, smiling and returning a smile, shaking hands and passing a gift or business card are some of the most important interactions in the real world. Collaborative Virtual Environm...

We did collect information on occupation. We had twenty different occupations reported and the most common responses were homemaker, farmer, construction, clerk, nurse, and seller. These six professions accounted for about 75% of the subjects and none of these has an a priori likelihood of having high PAH exposures. We did plot 1-OHPG by job and found no suggestions of interesting results. Ther...

   Background & Objective: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the main cause of morbidity and mortality in most countries. By identifying the population attributable risk (PAR) of the main risk factors of CVDs, the overall effect of various exposures on a population can be determined; the findings could be used in CVD prevention. The present study aimed to explore the PAR of some factors, includin...

OBJECTIVE The assessment of workplace physical load is highly resource intensive. This study tested whether a single-item measure asking individuals about perceived physical strain (PPS) at work was an acceptable proxy for physical load. METHODS The study was conducted in a subset of the GAZEL cohort (n = 2612) undergoing assessment of exposure to 38 occupational biomechanical constraints (re...

In this paper, we consider a model of partially mixed duopoly with conjectured variations equilibrium (CVE). The agents’ conjectures concern the price variations depending upon their production output’s increase or decrease. We establish existence and uniqueness results for the conjectured variations equilibrium (called an exterior equilibrium) for any set of feasible conjectures. To introduce ...

Social awareness is essential for effective learning. However, natural environments do not always provide optimal support for it. We analyze the potentials of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) in this context and provide a set of requirements for educational CVEs based on the needs of learning communities. We also present a prototype based on these requirements.

We assessed the e ects of network latency and jitter on a cooperative tele-operation task in a collaborative virtual environment. Two remote partners worked together to manipulate shared virtual objects over a network. The task was to minimize the time to transfer a ring through one of four paths with the least number of collisions. The performance of human subjects was measured and analyzed qu...

Mobile group dynamics (MGDs) assist synchronous working in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), and virtual time (VT) extends the benefits to asynchronous working. The present paper describes the implementation of MGDs (teleporting, awareness and multiple views) and VT (the utterances of 23 previous users were embedded in a CVE as conversation tags), and their evaluation using an urban pl...