Abstract
The Swedish multiinstitutional research program MultiG spawned a number of research projects concerned with telecommunication, telecollaboration, and telepresence. One of these projects is DIVE (Distributed Interactive Virtual Environments), a multiuser virtual reality system developed jointly by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. DIVE is used as the platform for research in collaborative work in virtual spaces. In cooperation with the universities of Lancaster, Manchester, and Nottingham, the DIVE group has developed a spatial model for interaction. In this model each participant defines subspaces for their presence and attention. The intersection of those subspaces provides for varying degrees of mutual awareness, which is presumed to support more natural human-human interaction in virtual environments.