Small group behaviour experiments in the Coven project

The Collaborative Virtual Environments (Coven) project, a four-year European project launched in October 1995, designs and explores collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. It aims to investigate the feasibility of scalable CVE worlds through developing CVE systems and demonstrating prototype applications in a virtual travel rehearsal scenario. Our experiments in collaborative virtual environments investigated group behavior issues such as relationships between emergent leadership and computational resources, and the sense of presence and copresence among participants.