Social interactions in multiscale CVEs

A multiscale Collaborative Virtual Environment (mCVE) is a virtual world in which multiple users can independently resize themselves to work together on different sized aspects of very large and complicated structures. Interactions among users in an mCVE differ in many ways from those in traditional collaborative virtual environments. In this paper we explore collaboration-related issues affected by multiscale, such as social presence, perception of proximity, and cross-scale information sharing. We also report results of an experiment with our mCVE prototype system, which show the impact of multiscale capabilities on social interactions.