Designing collaborative virtual environments based on real spaces to promote community interaction

A collaborative virtual environment (CVE) is a metaphor of a real environment, but it is not a copy of it. Members of a community may not know each other in real life. The design of CVE in which members are known and there is interaction in a real space is different to the traditional design of CVE. It should consider the real location of each resource, appropriated awareness and communication strategies, and the human-human and human-resource relations. Our university department was selected as an example organizational unit for experimentation. We start with the real physical environment and we design a CVE to provide new collaboration features to people working in the unit and those who will visit it. The advantages of the approach are many. First, people are familiar with the basic physical environment. Second, some activities requiring physical presence can be done with virtual presence, enabling more convenient ways to work for employees. Third, new opportunities for collaborative work appear as it is easy to do them with the proposed CVE. Finally, the approach is extensible, since new features can be added. We present the approach and the design of the proposed CVE.