Designing shared virtual environments for social interaction.
Steve R. Pettifer, Adrian J. West, Andy Crabtree, Craig D. Murray · Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) · 1999
The Distributed Legible City (DLC) is an interactive multi-media art installation enabling a number of `cyclists' to participate in a shared virtual environment and to tour together around three city representations. In this paper we describe the evolution of the DLC guided by ethnographic study. In particular we consider the implications and problems associated with designing a virtual environment where the requirements, such `support social interaction' are ambiguous and open ended. 1 Introduction Virtual environments (VEs) appear to offer many novel things: the potential, using immersive technology, to engage the human perceptual and kinaesthetic faculties in ways impossible using other techniques; the prospect of rehearsing tasks in the virtual world such that skills may be transferred to the real world; or the opportunity for richer engagement with applications and other users. However, constructing anything but the most trivial VE is a technically challenging task, and unt...