Although it is generally desirable that users in a collaborative virtual environment should perceive it in the same way we argue that in some situations it may be useful to allow users’ views of the environment to diverge, allowing each user to tailor their view to one that best suits their needs whilst still allowing some form of collaboration. We refer to such environments as subjective envir...

Coordination is an essential ingredient for human-agent teamwork. It requires team members to share knowledge to establish common grounding and mutual awareness among them. This paper proposes a behavioral architecture CBDI that enhances the knowledge sharing using natural language communication between team members. Collaborative conversation protocols and resource allocation mechanism have be...

We outline an experimental study investigating the use of facial expressions of emotion, as a means of non-verbal communication in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). The premise is that by incorporating an emotional channel alongside the conventional informational content, the user experience may be enriched. We established detailed knowledge about how facial expressions can be effectiv...

3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have promising potential for supporting socializing and learning in a university context because of their capability to provide a social arena where students and teachers can meet overcoming the barriers of the physical world [10]. In addition, the virtual space provides a dynamic and flexible environment where learners, especially distributed ones, ...

Presence has become a key concept in characterizing and evaluating Virtual Environments. Our contribution is to show that current measures of Presence, as a metric of users’ experience of Virtual Environments, are highly problematic: results from the literature cannot be repeated and it lacks a theoretical basis. We synthesize results from three experiments we conducted and in conclusion point ...

In this work informal learning theories and practices and social networking features are taken as starting points to build a reference collaboration model to support collaborative knowledge construction in Distributed Communities of Practices. Sample web 2.0 applications to fit the collaboration model purposes are then described. The provided model can give contribution to the design and to the...

In a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) for learning, an automatic analysis of collaborative interaction is helpful, either for a human or a virtual tutor, in a number of ways: to personalize or adapt the learning activity, to supervise the apprentices’ progress, to scaffold learners or to track the students’ involvement, among others. However, this monitoring task is a challenge that dema...

Immersive telecommunication is a new challenging field that enables a user to share a virtual space with remote participants providing users with a sense of telepresence and interaction. This paper presents an implementation of real-time dynamic 3D avatar from multi-view cameras for the immersive telecommunication. The main objective is to offer rich communication modalities, as similar as thos...

In this paper we describe CALVIN an immersive multimedia approach to applying virtual reality in ar chitectural design and collaborative visualization em phasizing heterogeneous perspectives These perspec tives including multiple mental models as well as mul tiple visual viewpoints allow virtual reality to be ap plied in the earlier more creative phases of design rather than just as a walk thro...

Networked Collaborative Virtual Environments (NCVE) have been a hot topic of research for some time now. However, most of the existing NCVE systems restrict the communication between the participants to text messages or audio communication. The natural means of human communication are richer than this. Facial expressions, lip movements, body postures and gestures all play an important role in o...