Towards realizing cooperative distributed workspaces for distributed virtual environments

Within current distributed virtual environments (DVEs) each participant operates in isolation and lacks facilities for sharing information with other participants. Therefore, because the information flow is incorrect, the participants are encumbered with unnecessary work and are not prepared to accomplish the tasks they must perform in the real world. Our research is directed toward ending this isolation by investigating means for inserting typical collaborative tools into DVE applications using existing DVE communication protocols. The research reported in this paper begins the process of identifying the tools required to promote effective cooperation within DVEs. We describe each of the collaborative work tools that we developed; each tools' purpose, capabilities, design, software architecture, and implementation; the techniques we use for display of information sent by other users; the communication protocol changes we propose; and the user interface to the tools. We conclude the paper with suggestions for further work.