Flexible 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment: WebTalk04

A Collaborative Virtual Environment, CVE, is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a “hosting” 3D world is the necessary ingredient: within it, users, provided with graphical embodiments, called avatars, that convey their identity (presence, location, movement, ..) can meet and interact with other users, with agents, or with virtual objects. As we move increasingly to a networked world, and with the promise of increased and improved data-flow through broadband networks, we believe that collaborative virtual environments will be of increasing importance. Distributed teams engaged in collaborative task using CVEs are getting rather common in fields such as gaming, military, training, and engineering. In this paper we present WebTalk04, a general purpose, flexible, framework for building 3D CVEs: the need of generating a variety of applications has led to high degree of flexibility and configurability. An XML configuration, in fact, allows to easily control most of its advanced features (including collaborative functions). WebTalk04 is a framework (rather than a specific application), developed by a joint team (University of Lecce and Politecnico di Milano). It supports complex cooperation features that have been tested with hundreds of “direct users” and thousands of “indirect users” as it will be explained in the paper. The paper will describe the framework architecture, and will also describe how we use 3D networking technologies, to leverage collaboration between users (at different locations) that are working on the same learning task: thus creating blended, distributed e-Learning activities, and extending the current concept of e-Learning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”).