Virtual Webworlds: extending the Web for collaboration

Synthesizes earlier work on collaboration and virtual worlds, and proposes a new attitude about distributed heterogeneous systems that extends both the shared artifacts of the World Wide Web and the shared presence of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), and in addition allows the use of any user-favored tools from within the same environment. The result is no loss of diversity or heterogeneity, and we claim a great improvement in computer support for collaboration. We propose the development of a collection of virtual Webworlds (VWWs), which are both more tightly coupled sets of Web services and data, and more distributed virtual worlds.