Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) that can be simultaneously shared by a number of participants located in different geographical locations, provide new possibilities for communication and collaboration, with a lot of potential for the way we work and exchange information. However, in order for such systems to be successful they need to provide the participants with a compelling experie...

This paper presents our research approach for guidance and control of a story character by young children. With this approach we argue that it is possible for a child to be at the same time an actor performing a role in the story and a engaged and empathic spectator of the overall story. To illustrate the approach we will describe Teatrix a collaborative virtual environment for story creation b...

Rendering and animating in real-time a multitude of articulated characters presents a real challenge and few hardware systems are up to the task. Up to now little research has been conducted to tackle the issue of real-time rendering of numerous virtual humans. However, due to the growing interest in collaborative virtual environments the demand for numerous realistic avatars is becoming strong...

ABSRACT An experimental comparison of interaction in the real world and a CAVE virtual environment was carried out, varying interaction with and without virtual hands and comparing two manipulation tasks. The double-handed task was possible in the real world but nearly impossible in the VE, leading to changed behaviour. The single-handed task showed more errors in the VE but few behaviour diffe...

Currently much importance is given to entrepreneurship in the economic development of the countries. Also, in the educational system (from primary school to college) value is given to the teaching of entrepreneurship concepts through many initiatives spread throughout the world. However, in primary school these initiatives are still rare, and this is a context where we consider the existence of...

Past studies have shown consistent underestimation of distances in virtual reality, though the exact causes remain unclear. Many virtual distance cues have been investigated, but past work has failed to account for the possible addition of cues from the physical environment. We describe two studies that assess users’ performance and strategies when judging horizontal and vertical distances in a...

background: with the recent spread of virtual learning programs in universities, especially in the field of medical sciences, libraries play a crucial role to support these programs. this study aimed at investigating the skills required by librarians to support virtual learning programs in isfahan university and isfahan university of medical sciences.   methods: this was an applied survey study...

The paper addresses three 3D immersive collaborative virtual environments for their utility to learning support. We analyze the needs of a lecturer that intends to supplement face-to-face teaching with computer mediated collaboration. The analysis aims at informing the design of a new virtual environment that is being developed in the FP7 ICT VirtualLife project. We examine the modern learners’...

In this paper we are presenting a novel approach to participant embodiment in networked collaborative virtual environments. Our embodiment approach integrates live video into 3D objects for a hybrid participant representation. We implemented our ideas in a Networked Collaborative Virtual Environment system, VLNET and investigated network and rendering issues in comparison with virtual human par...