Collaboration around Shared Objects in Immersive Virtual Environments

Many teamwork tasks in the real world require the shared manipulation of objects, both sequentially and concurrently. Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) bring remote people together in an interactive, spatial social and information context that is distributed over a network. Supporting highly collaborative tasks in a natural manner requires a thourough understanding of event traffic as distinct forms of shared object manipulation are bound to diverse real-time and consistency constraints. This position paper summarises our findings during user trials around the shared manipulation of objects within linked immersive displays and introduce a CVE system with a flexible event-handling framework that allows task-oriented concictency control.