The virtual round table - a collaborative augmented multi-user environment

Abstract

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CVE 2000 San Francisco CA USA Copyright ACM 2000 1-58113-303-0/00/09...$5.00 ABSTRACT Existing immersed virtual reality and particularly augmented reality systems are usually based on dedicated and expensive hardware and I/O devices. Nevertheless they often provide limited support for the collaboration between multiple users and can hardly be used for arbitrary location independent application environments. Additionally, navigation and interaction within such virtual environments are not very natural or intuitive, making them difficult to use. This paper will introduce a new collaborative augmented reality environment the Virtual Round Table. This environment is designed to support location-independent mixed reality applications, overcoming the limitations for collaboration and interaction of existing approaches. Moreover it extends the physical workplace of the users into the virtual environment, while preserving traditional verbal and non-verbal communication and cooperation mechanisms.