Collaborative virtual environments: going beyond virtual reality

With the growing demand for collaboration technologies, several CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) systems have been developed. CVEs (collaborative virtual environments) represent an important category of CSCW systems that generally make use of 3D shared space to provide collaboration facilities. However in most CVEs collaboration is restricted to the virtual reality context. In this paper, it is proposed to extend CVEs through the integration of different collaboration tools in order to allow collaboration to take place in different contexts (e.g. Web browsing), in a parallel and coordinated way with the virtual scene.