A Research On Navigation And Spatial Awareness In Collaborative Virtual Environment

The prospect of collaboration among geographically dispersed participants over a networked virtual reality is quite attractive. CVE involve the use of distributed VR technology to support group work. A necessary condition for a CVE is the provision of simultaneous multi-user access to a virtual reality system. However, there may be a world of difference between a multi-user system and one that actually supports cooperative work, and so a second condition is that the system must explicitly consider and support the needs of users who wish to work together. The essence of CVE is that users are explicitly represented to each other within a shared space. As a promising technology, CVE has already had some experimental applications in the fields of scientific visualization, collaborative design, battlefield simulation and so on.This work summarizes the framework, analysis, and organization of CVE. In the task of thisstudy, the goal is to achieving a better spatial awareness in service of collaborative navigation.As multiple users populate the large space, it is not a trivial task for them to coordinate amongthemselves and to achieve their navigational goal in such an environment. Depending on thework desired and the environment the participants are working in, different types of navigationaltasks are required. However, this previous work deals mostly with the problem of individualnavigation. Since navigation performed by groups has its own characteristics that go beyondindividual navigation. The thesis proposed a process model for collaborative navigation on thebasis of individual navigation model. In the case of the spatial awareness problem, acomputationally tractable formulation of a problem space is obtained by analyzing the initialstate, goal state, the process from the initial state to goal state for the spatial awareness problemand some operators to alter the state. Three basic perspective displays: first person, tethered andthird person are consistent with the theoretical analysis based on the problem space specification.This work discusses the attributes of awareness aids, and five types of important parameters, thatis, coordinate system type, identifiablity, mobility, manipulability and type of the goal. In the end,the thesis put forward a method of designing spatial awareness aids, and an aid base on agent-isdevised. An experimental paradigm and a task environment were built to test several designs.This work will contribute to the accumulating body of knowledge concerning the use oftechnology to support collaborative work.