LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments: Current State and Utilization Perspective

Recent advances in the field of web technologies, including the increasing support of virtual reality hardware, have allowed for shared virtual environments, reachable by just entering a URL in a browser. One contemporary solution that provides such a shared virtual reality is LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments (LIRKIS G-CVE). It is a web-based software system, built on top of the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks. This paper describes LIRKIS G-CVE and introduces its two original components. The first one is the Smart-Client Interface, which turns smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, into input devices. The advantage of this component over the standard way of user input is demonstrated by a series of experiments. The second component is the Enhanced Client Access layer, which provides access to positions and orientations of clients that share a virtual environment. The layer also stores a history of connected clients and provides limited control over the clients. The paper also outlines an ongoing experiment aimed at an evaluation of LIRKIS G-CVE in the area of virtual prototype testing.

Designing spaces to support collaborative creativity in shared virtual environments

Shared virtual environments (SVEs) have been researched extensively within the fields of education, entertainment, work, and training, yet there has been limited research on the creative and collaborative aspects of interactivity in SVEs. The important role that creativity and collaboration play in human society raises the question of the way that virtual working spaces might be designed to support collaborative creativity in SVEs. In this paper, we outline an SVE named LeMo, which allows two people to collaboratively create a short loop of music together. Then we present a study of LeMo, in which 52 users composed music in pairs using four different virtual working space configurations. Key findings indicated by results include: (i) Providing personal space is an effective way to support collaborative creativity in SVEs, (ii) personal spaces with a fluid light-weight boundary could provide enough support, worked better and was preferable to ones with rigid boundaries and (iii) a configuration that provides a movable personal space was preferred to one that provided no mobility. Following these findings, five corresponding design implications for shared virtual environments focusing on supporting collaborative creativity are given and conclusions are made.