| Because of their ubiquity, the Web and the Internet are natural environments to support powerful, geographically unlimited human interactions such as the ones required in work collaboration, education, and general social interaction. A variety of ad hoc tools have been developed to support these uses but the great majority of them are restricted to one or several specific dimensions of interaction and very few offer all essential functionalities while being extendible and customizable. MITRE's open source text-based virtual environment - Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) [CVW Homepage, 2000] 1 - is one of the best implementations that offer these features within an easy to understand metaphor.; The first part of this thesis reviews the fundamentals of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Virtual Environment (VE)2, and related work. It then describes CVW architecture and design, and highlights CVW limitations such as scalability and its restrictive functionalities. The main part of the thesis shows how the extension of CVW - Federated CVW (FCVW) 3 overcomes CVW limitations and describes FCVW features and implementations.; 1CVW is discussed in Chapter 4. 2CSCW and VE are discussed in Chapter 2 and 3. 3FCVW is discussed in Chapter 5. |
