A survey of communication and awareness in collaborative virtual environments

Abstract

In the domain of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), many virtual worlds, frameworks and techniques are built based on a specific and direct purpose. There is not a general and still good and efficient enough solution for all the collaborative systems. Depending on the purpose of the collaborative work, the techniques of interaction and of manipulation change from one application to another. Despite this difference between interaction techniques, they always benefit greatly from awareness features that help in explicating implicit knowledge related to one's own and others' working activities as well as to virtual workspace. In addition, people in CVEs also use communication channels to negotiate shared understandings of task goals, of task decomposition and of task progress. Therefore, awareness and communication are usually considered as "instruments" to complete collaborative tasks in the environment. However, few research work have been devoted to improving the awareness and the communication channels in CVEs for a better collaboration between users. In this paper, we will study the importance of awareness and communication in collaborative virtual environments. We will investigate different kinds of awareness which need to be carefully designed. We will also discuss different communication means and how to cope with this diversity, so we can benefit from the availability of different peripheral devices and can find an effective communication means to work together. Finally, we will make some propositions to overcome these actual limitations of CVEs.achieved, the performing step takes place while the communication and the awareness steps still go on.In the collaborative working process, the two important steps including coordination and performing, will highly benefit from awareness features that help to represent implicit knowledge related to one's own or others' working activities. In addition, people in CVEs also use communication channels to negotiate shared understandings of task goal, of task decomposition and of task progress. Therefore, awareness and communication are usually considered as "instruments" to complete collaborative tasks in an environment.In this paper, we will study the importance of awareness and communication in CVEs, and will investigate different kinds of awareness which need to be carefully designed in collaborative systems. Furthermore, we will discuss different communication means and how to cope with this diversity, so we can benefit from the availability of different peripheral devices and can find an effective communication means to work together.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The next section describes in more detail several kinds of awareness, followed by a small discussion on how to design a CVE for improving awareness. Different means of communication are briefly presented in the third section. The paper concludes with a discussion on the actual limitations of existing awareness and communication work and some suggestions of different aspects t...

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