A survey of communication and awareness in collaborative virtual environments

In the domain of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), many virtual worlds, frameworks and techniques are built based on a specific and direct purpose. There is not a general and still good and efficient enough solution for all the collaborative systems. Depending on the purpose of the collaborative work, the techniques of interaction and of manipulation change from one application to another. Despite this difference between interaction techniques, they always benefit greatly from awareness features that help in explicating implicit knowledge related to one's own and others' working activities as well as to virtual workspace. In addition, people in CVEs also use communication channels to negotiate shared understandings of task goals, of task decomposition and of task progress. Therefore, awareness and communication are usually considered as “instruments” to complete collaborative tasks in the environment. However, few research work have been devoted to improving the awareness and the communication channels in CVEs for a better collaboration between users. In this paper, we will study the importance of awareness and communication in collaborative virtual environments. We will investigate different kinds of awareness which need to be carefully designed. We will also discuss different communication means and how to cope with this diversity, so we can benefit from the availability of different peripheral devices and can find an effective communication means to work together. Finally, we will make some propositions to overcome these actual limitations of CVEs.