In this paper we explore the iterative design of the Augurscope, a mobile mixed reality device for open-air museum experiences. It allows a 3D virtual environment to be viewed as if overlaid on an outdoor physical environment. While exploring a heritage site, groups of visitors can experience simulated scenes from the past from a dynamic user-controlled viewpoint by moving, rotating, and tilting the device. The development focused on creating an interface to a visualization of a medieval castle as it used to appear in relation to its current, quite different site. We describe the development and application of the Augurscope through two iterative design stages. We discuss the issues revealed through public trials with the first prototype and how they informed the design of the Augurscope 2. The deployment of this second prototype then enables us to offer insights into what makes such a novel presentation device successful in an outdoor museum environment.

Inhabited television takes traditional broadcast television and combines it with multiuser virtual reality to give new possibilities for interaction and participation in and around shows or channels. Out of This World was an experimental inhabited TV show, staged in Manchester in September of 1998, using the MASSIVE-2 system. During this event, we captured comprehensive records of network traffic and additional logs of user activity (in particular, movement and speaking). In this paper, we present the results of our analyses of network and user activity in these shows. We contrast our results with those obtained from previous analyses of teleconferencing-style scenarios. We find that the inhabited television scenario results in much higher levels of user activity and significant bursts of coordinated activity. We show how these characteristics must be taken into account when designing a system and infrastructure for applications of this kind. In particular, it is clear that any notion of strict turn-taking (and associated assumptions about resource sharing) is completely unfounded in this domain. We also show that the concept of “levels of participation” is a powerful tool for understanding and managing the bandwidth requirements of an inhabited television event.

COVEN (Collaborative Virtual Environments) is a European project that seeks to develop a comprehensive approach to the issues in the development of collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. COVEN brings together twelve academic and industrial partners with a wide range of expertise in CSCW, networked VR, computer graphics, human factors, HCI, and telecommunications infrastructures. After two years of work, we are presenting the main features of our approach and results, our driving applications, the main components of our technical investigations, and our experimental activities. With different citizen and professional application scenarios as driving forces, COVEN is exploring the requirements and supporting techniques for collaborative interaction in scalable CVEs. Technical results are being integrated in an enriched networked VR platform based on the dVS and DIVE systems. Taking advantage of a dedicated Europe-wide ISDN and ATM network infrastructure, a large component of the project is a trial and experimentation activity that should allow a comprehensive understanding of the network requirements of these systems as well as their usability issues and human factors aspects.

We focus on the problem of constructing collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that scale to large numbers of simultaneous participants and yet which still afford rich and varied possibilities for communication. This is achieved by extending our previously defined spatial model of interaction for CVEs to include third-party objects that provide support for contextual factors in awareness calculations and that enhance scaleability. Third parties can have two effects on awareness: attenuation or amplification of existing awareness relationships, and the introduction of new aggregate awareness relationships. We propose a range of applications for third-party objects including world structuring regions, aggregate views, dynamic crowds of participants, common foci, representational and group services, and dynamic load management. We also discuss how the third-party concept relates to other approaches to structuring virtual environments such as tiles, zones, and locales. We then present an implementation, the MASSIVE-2 system, focusing on its network architecture which is based on a dynamic and selfconfiguring hierarchy of multicast groups. Finally, we describe four demonstration applications that have been developed in MASSIVE-2: an environment for staging a public poetry performance that includes semiprivate zones for social interaction; the Panoptican Plaza, which demonstrates a variety of differently bounded regions; a collaborative 3-D Web browser that groups pages into server regions; and the Arena, a performance space that supports both static and mobile crowd aggregations of groups of participants.

We explore the issue of supporting cooperative work using networked virtual reality. This exploration covers three major themes: supporting communication and awareness, structuring space, and embodying users. Correspondingly, three sets of concepts are introduced. The first is a spatial model of interaction, which defines the mechanisms of aura, awareness, focus, nimbus, and adapters to allow the inhabitants of virtual environments to flexibly manage their communication across a number of media. The second is a set of techniques for constructing Populated Information Terrains (PITS), abstract data spaces that support the cooperative browsing of information. The third is a set of design issues for virtual bodies. Each set of concepts is illustrated with a discussion of prototype applications implemented within our own DIVE and MASSIVE networked virtual reality systems.