Networked Learning Spaces
Collaborative Virtual Environment
to
Promote Shared Awareness

The NLS Concept

NLS is a distributed collaborative virtual environment in which students interact and learn, allowing for multiple-participant communication over textual, graphical, audio and video media. It also allows users to form groups, create tools provided by toolboxes and mechanisms to save, retreive and review the product of these tools.

Our position is that by sending cognitive and social types of information, distance collaboration can be greatly facilitated. Important information we visualize and share in this paper is social in nature such as the participation process, participant relationships, degrees of commitment (or participation), flow of information among participants which are evident in the physical world.

NLS Shared Virtual World

The shared virtual world is a navigable 3D space provided by the graphical user interface, and includes self and other participants represented by cubes as depicted in Figure 1. A participant embodiment is represented with the participant's name or other kind of representations attached onto the cube. The virtual space is called a field representing a classroom or laboratory administered by a teacher or mentor. A field is created based on the assumption that there will be multiple projects in the network and the projects are supervised by several teachers, each of whom has a field collaboratively or independently.

Architecture

The NLS prototype was developed using the Shastra Collaboration Substrate. It provides a collaborative virtual enviroment, and communication tools for communicating amongst the various participants in the environment such as collaborative Video, Audio, Text and E-mail communication tools. The system is accessed through an X-Window-based graphical user interface, and an OpenInventor-based They-world is provided for interactive navigation of the virtual environment. The NLS Virtual Environment is made up of three executable programs as in Figure 2: An NLS User Interface, a Session Manager, and a Kernel, each of which is explained in the following.

Sample Pictures and Animations

They World Animation	Tool Use Animation	Network Video Animation
Three Person Experiment	NTT Children Experiment

Papers

NLS: Collaborative Virtual Environment ot Promote Shared Awareness N. Osumi, M. Shinya, T. Mori, T. Sunaga, C. Bajaj, S. Cutchin, R. Merkert, Workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization and Manipulation, NPIV '96 1996, pg 41-45