Creation and performance analysis of user representations in collaborative virtual environments

In distributed collaborative virtual environments, participants are often embodied or represented in some form within a virtual world. The representations take many different forms and are often driven by limitations in the available technology. Desktop web based environments typically use textual or two dimensional representations, while high end environments use motion trackers to embody a participant and their actions in an avatar of human form. This paper describes this wide range of virtual user representations and their creation and performance issues investigated as part of the Human-Computer Symbiotes project within DARPA's Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization (IC&V) program.