Supporting transcontinental collaborative work in persistent virtual environments

One long-term goal at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory is to create a persistent virtual environment enabling transcontinental collaboration over high-speed and high-bandwidth networks connected to heterogeneous supercomputing resources and large data stores. Our focus is on researching techniques required to support general collaboration in persistent virtual environments. These techniques include the representation of virtual co-presence, video and audio teleconferencing, virtual reality (VR) interfaces, and database technology for sustaining persistence in virtual worlds. These techniques are used in a collaborative design laboratory called Calvin (Collaborative Architecture Via Immersive Navigation). Calvin was designed to run in the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE).