Digital Meeting Environments (DiME)

    The DiME project is a collaboration between SICS, Telia
    Research and the Centre for User Oriented IT Design
    that aims to develop and study the use of Collaborative
    Virtual Environments (CVEs) as the basis for computer
    supported meetings between geographically separated
    persons.

Multi-participant distributed virtual reality systems are emerging as a new class of tools supporting groups in collaborative work situations. The use of natural spatial metaphors, together with the integration of participants and data within the same common spatial frame of reference creates the potential to support a broad range of co-operative applications in the varied fields of design, visualisation, simulation, training and education, telemedicine as well as entertainment.

The main research objectives of the project are:

• To gain an understanding of the social and technical issues involved in establishing and running effective meetings within collaborative virtual environments and how these differ from more traditional physical meetings.
• To improve the general understanding of the potential and utility of CVEs as a new media for supporting distributed virtual meetings where participants can seamlessly interleave informal communication with the more formal aspects of structured meetings.
• To develop appropriate supporting mechanisms for different forms of meetings in virtual environments and explore how general facilities can be amended and tailored to support particular meetings.
• To outline a general design approach for the construction of virtual environments affording appropriate support for meetings. This will include the layout, presentation and interactive features of these environments and the general interrelationship between the interactive features of the CVE and more structured meeting support software.

               Olov Ståhl, olovs@sics.se
 

       Tomas Uhlin, Tomas.H.Uhlin@telia.se
 

                 Sören Lenman, lenman@nada.kth.se
 

Publications:

Ståhl, Olov. 1999., "Meetings for real - Experiences from a series of VR-based project meetings."  In Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology 1999, 20-22nd December, 1999, UCL, London