PNNL-13501 - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Non-Verbal Communication in Virtual Collaborative Environments
Study Control Number: PN99053/1387
Irene Schwarting, Scott Decker
Collaborations are becoming increasingly prominent as a part of daily working life. Increasingly, work is being done
between individuals in spatially separated locations who work together with data in an electronic environment. This
change in working habits has pointed up an urgent need for tools that support distributed individuals in working together
in real time. The tools need to enable users to represent themselves in trustworthy, reliable ways, as well as to manipulate
their own representations and the data with which they are working in the collaborative environment.
Project Description
Although collaborative tools are offered for teamwork
and learning, electronic communication still tends to be
strictly sequential and static. This research describes a
Java three-dimensional-based prototype electronic
collaboration tool that supports dynamic creation of
gestures and behaviors among users interacting in a datacentric
virtual environment. This report also describes
comparisons and evaluations of a range of interaction
technologies used to control position and motion in a
three-dimensional environment. In addition to enabling
users to work directly with data, this technology will
greatly enhance the ability of users in disparate spatial
locations to effectively communicate by providing a
mechanism for dynamically and in real-time manipulating
the objects and user-representatives in the environment.
It also has the potential to support long-term and
widespread enhancements in virtual collaboration
technologies.
Introduction
Three significant reasons that tools for interaction and
collaboration in three-dimensional “virtual” electronic
environments fail to achieve the efficiency of real, faceto-face
collaboration are as follows. First, virtual tools
poorly support nonverbal and social interactions. Second,
traditional, two-dimensional interaction devices, such as
the ubiquitous mouse and keyboard, are fundamentally
unsuited for six-degree-of-freedom motion and
manipulation in three-dimensional virtual worlds. Third,
few virtual environments support dynamic, real-time
updates to objects and the environment itself, making
them unwieldy and inconvenient as interaction
environments.
The research described in this report approached this issue
through the use of a dynamic virtual environment in
164 FY 2000 Laboratory Directed Research and Development Annual Report
which users are represented by human-form “avatars.”
The user can dynamically manipulate the posture of the
avatar, as well as other information objects, to move and
interact with the virtual environment. This technology in
a virtual collaborative workspace has the potential to
increase the efficacy of distance collaboration because
users can interact in real time with each other as well as
collaboratively interact with data. Avatar technology is
well established and a number of agencies are working
with avatars in attempts to create collaborative virtual
environments. This research developed a uniquely
dynamic type of avatar that gets around the traditional
problems of avatars and virtual environments as a
collaborative tool. Through additional research in
alternative interaction and control devices, we have
addressed the problem of controlling movement and
position in three-dimensional spaces.
Approach
The dynamic avatars software was developed based on an
architecture jointly developed by the Laboratory and by
the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the
University of Washington. This virtual world uses a
client-server architecture based on Java and Java3D. The
architecture allows for actions, such as geometry
manipulation, data passing, and interactions, to happen in
real time across all client machines connected to the
environment. Any connected user can enter data into the
environment, making it visible and accessible to all users
of the environment. All types of data can be represented
as dynamic objects within the environment. Visual object
formats, such as Virtual Reality Modeling Language, can
easily be represented, but the architecture equally
supports representation of nonvisual data. Any object can
be assigned any behaviors, interactions, information, and
accessibility options that the user wishes to assign it.
Dynamic objects interact with each other, providing each
other with the ability to view their information, behaviors,