AMMP-EXTN: A User Privacy and Collaboration Control Framework for a Multi-User Collaboratory Virtual Reality System

In this thesis, we propose a new design of privacy and session control for improving a collaborative molecular modeling CVR system AMMP-VIS [1]. The design mainly addresses the issue of competing user interests and privacy protection coordination. Based on our investigation of AMMP-VIS, we propose a four-level access control structure for collaborative sessions and dynamic action priority specification for manipulations on shared molecular models. Our design allows a single user to participate in multiple simultaneous sessions. Moreover, a messaging system with text chatting and system broadcasting functionality is included. A 2D user interface [2] for easy command invocation is developed in Python. Two other key aspects of system implementation, the collaboration Central deployment and the 2D GUI for control are also discussed. Finally, we describe our system evaluation plan which is based on an improved cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation as well as statistical usage data

Supporting meetings in Virtual Worlds with enhanced Communication features

With the rapid growth in the use of computer for addressing our day to day needs and the increased use of technology in our daily life, we cannot imagine a day without the use of the internet for our routine needs. Today, without any doubt in our mind we can say that technology has taken over human lives completely. A new era of computing has evolved where computers and the internet have a huge impact on everyone‟s life. A lot of research has been done and is in process for generated tools and devices which will bring the world even closer. It started with telephone in the last century and since then till today there have been huge number of tools and devices that try to give the users who are geographically far away a sense of co-presence. The latest technology making rounds is the Virtual World technology. The popularity and impact of online virtual worlds is worth making a note of. It needs to be seen now, how does it really betters people lives. One such persistent virtual world is Second Life. The number of users and organizations associated with this world is impressive. It provides users with the right amount of collaborative content with a set of communication features. Second Life provides its users with unique meeting support which gives them a sense of co-presence achieved nowhere else. This thesis focuses upon the kind of meeting support, collaborative content and the communication features provided by the virtual world that will allow its users to avoid the need for travel and long distance meetings can be achieved successfully in such an environment. This will help the travel time to be converted to productive office time as well as the costs involved in such meetings can also be reduced drastically. Such kind of meetings will also prove eco-friendly as they will save on fuel consumption and benefit from reduced pollution

Multidisciplinary medical team meetings: A field study of collaboration in health care

We present an observational study that was conducted to guide the design of an enhanced collaboration platform to support distributed multidisciplinary team meetings between two hospitals. Our goal was to find out how the breast cancer multidisciplinary team collaborates in their face-to-face meetings and in their discussions using an existing videoconferencing system and to identify obstacles and issues to their primary tasks. We identified a set of concerns around the way visibility and audibility affect the social cohesion of the group and impede communication and situation awareness between the distributed team. We also identified a parallel set of concerns around the difficulty of preparing and interacting around the medical images used in the meetings. These issues exposed a complex matrix of technical, social, procedural and organisational factors that affect the collaboration. We suggest potential directions for technical interventions in this setting

Implementation of courseware for Internet delivery

A process centered environment for implementing courseware is presented. The proposed environment addresses some of the constraints in the existing state of the art technology, presently used for distance education. The environment interface is developed using MS FrontPage 98 web development software. The thesis describes the design and implementation of the environment, which is named WVUCT. WVUCT utilizes MS NetMeeting software as a mode for interacting with the students in many different ways. WVUCT uses MS FrontPage 98 for developing a web-based course. The course web once developed using the environment can be published to any httpd server for student\u27s use as well as instructor use. The process model presented specifies the major and minor steps, which can be followed by instructors in preparing effective web-based educational modules. These modules may include lecture notes, assignments and tests. At each step of the process, the environment provides templates and examples on developing the different parts of an educational module using suggested tools and resources. The process model assumes no previous experience on the part of instructors in developing web-based educational modules

Distributed Team Training: Effective Team Feedback

The United States Army currently uses after action reviews (AARs) to give personnel feedback on their performance. However, due to the growing use of geographically distributed teams, the traditional AAR, with participants and a moderator in the same room, is becoming difficult; therefore, distributed AARs are becoming a necessity. However, distributed AARs have not been thoroughly researched. To determine what type of distributed AARs would best facilitate team training in distributed Army operations, feedback media platforms must be compared. This research compared three types of AARs, which are no AAR, teleconference AAR, and teleconference AAR with visual feedback, to determine if there are learning differences among these conditions. Participants completed three search missions and received feedback between missions from one of these conditions. Multiple ANOVAs were conducted to compare these conditions and trials. Results showed that overall the teleconference AAR with visual feedback improved performance the most. A baseline, or no AAR, resulted in the second highest improvement, and the teleconference condition resulted in the worst overall performance. This study has implications for distributed military training and feedback, as well as other domains that use distributed training and feedback

Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators

In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for loading software components into separate POSIX threads for rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction. We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version