Section: Scientific Foundations

Collaborative work in CVE's

The third aspect is to propose Collaborative Virtual Environments for several local or distant users. In these environments, distant experts could share their expertise for project review, for collaborative design or for analysis of data resulting from scientific computations in HPC context. Sharing the virtual environment is certainly a key point that leads to propose new software architectures ensuring the data distribution and the synchronization of the users.

In terms of interaction, new multi-modal interaction metaphors have to be proposed to tackle with the awareness of other users? activity. Here it is important to see a virtual representation of the other users, of their activity, and of the range of their action field, in order to better understand both their potential and their limitation for collaboration: what they can see, what they can reach, what their interaction tools are and which possibilities they offer.

Simultaneous collaborative interactions upon the same data through local representations of these data should be tackled by new generic algorithms dedicated to consistency management. Some solutions have to be proposed for distant collaboration, where it is not possible any more to share tangible devices to synchronize co-manipulation: we should offer some new haptic rendering to enforce users' coordination. Using physics engines for realistic interaction with virtual objects is also a challenge if we want to offer low latency feedback to the users. Indeed, the classical centralized approach for physics engines is not able to offer fast feedback to distant users, so this approach must be improved.