Collaborative Virtual Environments

Our world is now entering an age where our current understanding of telecommunications and graphics computing will constantly be challenged. The universal advancement of graphics technology, new business models, and the continuing upgrade of global infrastructure are transforming the solitary, platform-centric 3D computing model. With the availability of global information highways intercontinental collaboration using 3D graphics will become par of our daily work routine. In this paper we describe the basic ideas, technologies and scenarios of collaborative virtual environments (CVE). As an effective vehicle for multimedia visualisation and group interaction, CVEs will support multimedia object manipulations and enable discussions and real-time comments on video, audio, image or textual information.