Supporting Social Awareness with 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments and Mobile Devices: VirasMobile

Abstract

Social awareness is essential for effective learning. 3D collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) have been proposed as a tool for social awareness support in an educational context as the natural environments are often not sufficient for this purpose. User evaluations of the prototype that was developed to test the suitability of 3D CVEs in this context identified a number of problems in terms of supporting short-term social awareness. To overcome these shortages, we propose to supplement 3D CVEs with mobile devices. The paper presents a revised set of requirements for the augmented system, describes the corresponding design and outlines the technical implementation of a prototype.