COVEN is a project focusing on the development of a computational service
for teleworking and virtual presence. The overall objective of the project
is to provide the facilities needed to support future cooperative teleworking
systems. The project is a unique endeavour that brings together expertise
on communications infrastructures; computer supported cooperative work;
virtual reality and animation to provide support for a European wide distributed
virtual environment. This virtual environment will enable groups of geographically
disparate users to work together by inhabiting common information spaces.
The main goal of the COVEN project is to define a new platform, which
will be able to deal with 3D, shared environment. This platform is based
on two existing software called dVS (from Division company) and Dive (Swedish
Institute of Computer Science) in order to take benefit of their experience
in the 3D shared environment field. Basically, these kinds of application
permit to people, who are at different geographical places,
to share a common 3D virtual world. Each client has a graphical representation
called an "avatar". After two years of work, we are presenting
the main features of our approach and results ; our driving applications,
the main components in our technical investigations and our driving applications,
the main components in our technical investigations and our experimental
activities. With different citizen and professional application scenarios
as driving forces, COVEN is exploring the requirements and supporting techniques
for collaborative interaction in scalable CVEs. Taking advantage of a dedicated
Europe-wide ISDN and ATM network infrastructure, a large component of the
project is a trial and experimentation activity that should allow to build
up a comprehensive understanding both of the technical network requirement
of such systems and of their usability issues and human factors aspects.
The main task of LIG was to integrate his knowledge on virtual humans
modeling and animation in both systems, dVS and Dive, in order to increase
the reality of these 3D shared world. First, LIG converted his human representation
in both specific formats, dVS and Dive formats. Through this first step,
LIG obtained in both dVS and Dive applications a representation of each
client connected to the 3D shared world, which is closest to a real human.
This permits to people, who are not used to virtual worlds, to have a more
intuitive approach and feeling in front of avatars looking like real
humans. Second, LIG developed an external system to control these
"avatars" and to make them less static. The only fact of importing
LIG's virtual humans increased the way each participant is represented,
but it didn't increase the functionality of basic software. Because virtual
humanís animation is one of the main research areas of LIG, a software
was developed, independently of dVS and Dive, based only on the internal
representation of virtual body. This system is connected to dVS or Dive
by using a shared memory segment through which information for the body
animation will be sent to the application from the external body controller
program. The previously imported body representation can then walk
, grasp an object in the 3D shared world, or play a define animation which
increases the way each client can communicate with each other in this 3D
virtual world. As this external body controller is based on libraries developed
in LIG, each extension of these libraries can be imported and made available
inside both dVS and Dive.