In recent years, virtual environments have played a key role in engineering education. The use of virtual environments as learning tools continues to grow on account of the capabilities of providing learners with more interactive and immersive learning experiences than most of the conventional learning methods. This paper aims to introduce the related background and recent research work on the ...

the prominent features of national security in today's world are dimension change and its nature, taking place dramatically and with high speed. in this respect and in comparison to other areas, what is taken place in regard to information technology is more important. havingsecurity in virtual space is an important subject that is recently taken into account in strategic studies. the natu...

In this paper, a new type of interaction environment, the multiscale collaborative virtual environment (mCVE), is proposed to support multiple users working together at different scale levels. This paper introduces the concept of multiscale collaboration in the context of 3D virtual environments and describes the benefits of multiscale collaboration for understanding and managing large structur...

In this paper we present a Virtual Tennis Game. We describe the creation and modeling of the virtual humans and body deformations, also showing the real time animation and rendering aspects of the avatars. We focus on the virtual tennis ball animation and the behavior of the Synthetic Autonomous Referee, who judges the tennis games. The networked collaborative virtual environment system is desc...

This paper describes the methodological implications for evaluation research on collaborative virtual environments. The information is based on the experiences drawn from a longitudinal study of MASSIVE-1, a virtual reality tele-conferencing system. Benefits and drawbacks of the constraints on methodology, implicated by the developmental stage of collaborative virtual environment technology, ar...

We describe an "Annotated Lectures" system, which will be used in a global virtual teaching and student collaboration event on embodied intelligence presented by the University of Zurich. The lectures will be broadcasted via video-conference to lecture halls of different universities around the globe. Among other collaboration features, an "Annotated Lectures" system will be implemented in a 3D...

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be classified into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of “being there” in the CVE oneself. Co-presence is having a feeling that one is in the same place as the other participants, and that one is collaborating with real people. In this paper we describe an experiment to investigate the effects that s...

This paper investigates how inhabitants of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) can communicate with each other through channels other than speech, and it is primarily concerned with the perception of facial expressions of emotion in CVEs. We outline our experimental work on emotion recognition and investigate to what extent findings from real life socio-psychological research can be appli...

The increase of computing power and its wide availability has raised interest in the use of Collaborative Virtual Environments for training purposes. Nevertheless, many of the currently developed training simulations are inflexible and support only a limited number of scenarios, often limited to a single domain. This work aims to investigate the challenges of separating the domain logic from th...

In order to be effectively used as collaborative work tools, developers of virtual environments should invest, among other aspects, in the coordination of users’ activities. The goal of this work is to present coordination mechanisms that may be reused in different implementations of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs).