An Overview of the COVEN Platform

Abstract

A central aim of the COVEN project was to prototype large-scale applications of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that went beyond the existing state of the art. These applications were used in a series of real-scale networked trials that allowed us to gather many interesting human and technological results. To fulfill the technological and experimental goals of the project, we have modified an existing CVE platform: the DIVE (distributed interactive virtual environment) toolkit. In this paper, we present the different services and extensions that have been implemented within the platform during the four years of the project. Such a presentation will exemplify the different features that will have to be offered by nextgeneration CVE platforms. Implementation of the COVEN services has had implications at all levels of the platform: from a new networking layer through to mechanisms for high-level semantic modeling of applications.

Variations in physiological responses of participants during different stages of an immersive virtual environment experiment

“…The software used was a derivative of Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) version 3.3x [5,19] which was ported to support spatially immersive systems [19]. DIVE is an internetbased multi-user virtual reality system in which participants can navigate in a shared 3D space.…”

A Study of Event Traffic During the Shared Manipulation of Objects Within a Collaborative Virtual Environment

“…Relevant examples are NPSNET (Macedonia, Zyda, Pratt, Barham, & Zeswitz, 1994), PaRADE (Roberts, Sharkey, & Sandoz, 1995), DIVE (Frécon & Stenius, 1998), MASSIVE (Greenhalgh, Purbrick, & Snowdon, 2000), CAVERNsoft (Leigh, Johnson, & DeFanti, 1997) and QUICK (Capps, 2000). Some studies have investigated the performance of communication infrastructures used to link training simulators (Wuerfel, 1998;d'Ausbourg, Bussenot, & Siron 2002), while other studies have investigated the network traffic generated by both social gatherings and teamwork activities (Roberts, Richardson, Sharkey, & Lake, 1998;Roberts, Strassner, Worthington, & Sharkey, 1999;Frécon, Smith, Steed, Stenius, & Stahl, 2001;Greenhalgh, Bullock, Frécon, Lloyd, & Steed, 2001;Leigh et al, 2001).…”

Information exploration using The Pond

“…The visualiser and the pond application are built using the DIVE [10] distributed VR system from SICS. The virtual pond environment is in fact a DIVE virtual world, shared by the visualiser and the pond application.…”