VisionDome: A collaborative virtual environment

For three weeks in March 1996, visitors to the Learning Resource Centre at BT Laboratories could have been excused for thinking that aliens had landed in Suffolk (Figure 1). The UFO was in, fact the Vision Dome, an. interactive digital virtual-reality environment, which enables group interaction around common data or a shared application. This article reports on some of the technical challenges faced in developing content for the Vision Dome, reviews the response of the many visitors, and considers potential applications.