Collaborative Integration of Classic Applications in Virtual Reality Environments

When working collaboratively with others, it is often difficult to bring existing applications into the collaboration process. In this paper, an approach is shown how to enable different applications to work collaboratively. It enables a user to do three things: First, the ability to work collaboratively with the application of choice, selecting those applications that fit the need of the scenario best, and the user is comfortable to employ. Second, the user can work in the environment he chooses, even if the application is not specifically designed for this environment like Virtual Reality Environments or mobile devices. Third, the technology presented makes it possible to mesh applications to gain new functionalities not found in the original applications by connecting those applications and making them interoperable. Taking a Virtual Reality Environment and a standard office application, the use and fitness of this approach is shown. It should be specifically noted that the work underlying this paper is not specifically on multi modal usage of Virtual Environments, although it is used that way here, but rather showing a concept of meshing application capabilities to implement "Meta-Applications" that offer functionality beyond their original design.