An animated 3D manipulator for distributed collaborative window-based applications

This paper presents a new animated 3D graphical object manipulator to improve the visualisation of distributed window-based collaborative 3D applications. By applying animation techniques to the user interface, the experience of multi-user interaction may be enhanced. A major problem associated with distributed collaborative 3D applications is that interactions among users may cause conflicts, and it may be difficult to convey what these conflicts are. In addition, there is a need for additional feedback when interacting with 3D objects in current workstation 3D virtual reality applications. A prototype application is presented in the paper to demonstrate this new animated manipulator.