Large scale collaborative virtual environments

[N.B. Pagination of eThesis differs from printed thesis. The content is identical.] This thesis is concerned with the theory, design, realisation and evaluation of large-scale collaborative virtual environments. These are 3D audio-graphical computer generated environments which actively support collaboration between potentially large numbers of distributed users. The approach taken in this thesis reflects both the sociology of interpersonal communication and the management of communication in distributed systems. The first part of this thesis presents and evaluates MASSIVE-1, a virtual reality tele-conferencing system which implements the spatial model of interaction of Benford and Fahlén. The evaluation of MASSIVE-1 has two components: a user-oriented evaluation of the system’s facilities and the underlying awareness model; and a network-oriented evaluation and modelling of the communication requirements of the system with varying numbers of users. This thesis proposes the “third party object” concept as an extension to the spatial model of interaction. Third party objects can be used to represent the influence of context or environment on interaction and awareness, for example, the effects of boundaries, rooms and crowds. Third party objects can also be used to introduce and manage dynamic aggregates or abstractions within the environments (for example abstract overviews of distant crowds of participants). The third party object concept is prototyped in a second system, MASSIVE-2. MASSIVE-2 is also evaluated in two stages. The first is a user-oriented reflection on the capabilities and effectiveness of the third party concept as realised in the system. The second stage of the evaluation develops a predictive model of total and per-participant network bandwidth requirements for systems of this kind. This is used to analyse a number of design decisions relating to this type of system, including the use of multicasting and the form of communication management adopted

Large scale collaborative virtual environments

[N.B. Pagination of eThesis differs from printed thesis. The content is identical.] This thesis is concerned with the theory, design, realisation and evaluation of large-scale collaborative virtual environments. These are 3D audio-graphical computer generated environments which actively support collaboration between potentially large numbers of distributed users. The approach taken in this thesis reflects both the sociology of interpersonal communication and the management of communication in distributed systems. The first part of this thesis presents and evaluates MASSIVE-1, a virtual reality tele-conferencing system which implements the spatial model of interaction of Benford and Fahlén. The evaluation of MASSIVE-1 has two components: a user-oriented evaluation of the system’s facilities and the underlying awareness model; and a network-oriented evaluation and modelling of the communication requirements of the system with varying numbers of users. This thesis proposes the “third party object” concept as an extension to the spatial model of interaction. Third party objects can be used to represent the influence of context or environment on interaction and awareness, for example, the effects of boundaries, rooms and crowds. Third party objects can also be used to introduce and manage dynamic aggregates or abstractions within the environments (for example abstract overviews of distant crowds of participants). The third party object concept is prototyped in a second system, MASSIVE-2. MASSIVE-2 is also evaluated in two stages. The first is a user-oriented reflection on the capabilities and effectiveness of the third party concept as realised in the system. The second stage of the evaluation develops a predictive model of total and per-participant network bandwidth requirements for systems of this kind. This is used to analyse a number of design decisions relating to this type of system, including the use of multicasting and the form of communication management adopted

Using mobile group dynamics and virtual time to improve teamwork in large-scale collaborative virtual environments

Mobile group dynamics (MGDs) assist synchronous working in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), and virtual time (VT) extends the benefits to asynchronous working. The present paper describes the implementation of MGDs (teleporting, awareness and multiple views) and VT (the utterances of 23 previous users were embedded in a CVE as conversation tags), and their evaluation using an urban planning task. Compared with previous research using the same scenario, the new MGD techniques produced substantial increases in the amount that, and distance over which, participants communicated. With VT participants chose to listen to a quarter of the conversations of their predecessors while performing the task. The embedded VT conversations led to a reduction in the rate at which participants traveled around, but an increase in live communication that took place. Taken together, the studies show how CVE interfaces can be improved for synchronous and asynchronous collaborations, and highlight possibilities for future research

Using teleporting, awareness and multiple views to improve teamwork in collaborative virtual environments

Mobile Group Dynamics (MGDs) are a suite of techniques that help people work together in large-scale collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). The present paper describes the implementation and evaluation of three additional MGDs techniques (teleporting, awareness and multiple views) which, when combined, produced a 4 times increase in the amount that participants communicated in a CVE and also significantly increased the extent to which participants communicated over extended distances in the CVE. The MGDs were evaluated using an urban planning scenario using groups of either seven (teleporting + awareness) or eight (teleporting + awareness + multiple views) participants. The study has implications for CVE designers, because it provides quantitative and qualitative data about how teleporting, awareness and multiple views improve groupwork in CVEs. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems – Distributed applications; H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems – Human factors; Software psychology; H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia Information Systems – Artificial, augmented and virtual realities; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces – Collaborative computing; Computer-supported cooperative work; Synchronous interaction; I.3.7[Computer Graphics]: Three Dimensional Graphics and Realism – Virtual Realit

Teaching about Madrid: A Collaborative Agents-Based Distributed Learning Course

Interactive art courses require a huge amount of computational resources to be running on real time. These computational resources are even bigger if the course has been designed as a Virtual Environment with which students can interact. In this paper, we present an initiative that has been develop in a close collaboration between two Spanish Universities: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos with the aim of join two previous research project: a Collaborative Awareness Model for Task-Balancing-Delivery (CAMT) in clusters and the “Teaching about Madrid” course, which provides a cultural interactive background of the capital of Spain

Inhabiting Adaptive Architecture

Adaptive Architecture concerns buildings that are specifically designed to adapt to their inhabitants and to their environments. Work in this space has a very long history, with a number of adaptive buildings emerging during the modernist period, such as Rietveld’s Schröder house, Gaudi’s Casa Batlló and Chareau\u27s Maison de Verre. Such early work included manual adaptivity, even if that was motor-assisted. Today, buildings have started to combine this with varying degrees of automation and designed-for adaptivity is commonplace in office buildings and eco homes, where lighting, air conditioning, access and energy generation respond to and influence the behaviour of people, and the internal and external climate

Inhabiting Adaptive Architecture

Adaptive Architecture concerns buildings that are specifically designed to adapt to their inhabitants and to their environments. Work in this space has a very long history, with a number of adaptive buildings emerging during the modernist period, such as Rietveld’s Schröder house, Gaudi’s Casa Batlló and Chareau's Maison de Verre. Such early work included manual adaptivity, even if that was motor-assisted. Today, buildings have started to combine this with varying degrees of automation and designed-for adaptivity is commonplace in office buildings and eco homes, where lighting, air conditioning, access and energy generation respond to and influence the behaviour of people, and the internal and external climate

Mixed Reality Architecture: a dynamic architectural topology

Architecture can be shown to structure patterns of co-presence and in turn to be structured itself by the rules and norms of the society present within it. This two-way relationship exists in a surprisingly stable framework, as fundamental changes to buildings are slow and costly. At the same time, change within organisations is increasingly rapid and buildings are used to accommodate some of that change. This adaptation can be supported by the use of telecommunication technologies, overcoming the need for co-presence during social interaction. However, often this results in a loss of accountability or ‘civic legibility’, as the link between physical location and social activity is broken. In response to these considerations, Mixed Reality Architecture (MRA) was developed. MRA links multiple physical spaces across a shared 3D virtual world. We report on the design of MRA, including the key concept of the Mixed Reality Architectural Cell, a novel architectural interface between architectural spaces that are remote to each other. An in-depth study lasting one year and involving six office-based MRACells, used video recordings, the analysis of event logs, diaries and an interview survey. This produced a series of ethnographic vignettes describing social interaction within MRA in detail. In this paper we concentrate on the topological properties of MRA. It can be shown that the dynamic topology of MRA and social interaction taking place within it are fundamentally intertwined. We discuss how topological adjacencies across virtual space change the integration of the architectural spaces that MRA is installed in. We further reflect on how the placement of MRA technology in different parts of an office space (deep or shallow) impacts on the nature of that particular space. Both the above can be shown to influence movement through the building and social interaction taking place within it. These findings are directly relevant to new buildings that need to be designed to accommodate organisational change in future but also to existing building stock that might be very hard to adapt. We are currently expanding the system to new sites and are planning changes to the infrastructure of MRA as well as its interactional interface

The evaluation of an active networking approach for supporting the QOS requirements of distributed virtual environments

This paper describes work that is part of a more general investigation into how Active Network ideas might benefit large scale Distributed-Virtual-Environments (DVEs). Active Network approaches have been shown to offer improved solutions to the Scalable Reliable Multicast problem, and this is in a sense the lowest level at which Active Networks might benefit DVEs in supporting the peer-to-peer architectures considered most promising for large scale DVEs. To go further than this, the key benefit of Active Networking is the ability to take away from the application the need to understand the network topology and delegate the execution of certain actions, for example intelligent message pruning, to the network itself. The need to exchange geometrical information results in a type of traffic that can place occasional, short-lived, but heavy loads on the network. However, the Level of Detail (LoD) concept provides the potential to reduce this loading in certain circumstances. This paper introduces the performance modelling approach being used to evaluate the effectiveness of active network approaches for supporting DVEs and presents an evaluation of messages filtering mechanisms, which are based on the (LoD) concept. It describes the simulation experiment used to carry out the evaluation, presents its results and discusses plans for future work