A General Framework for Cooperative Manipulation in Virtual Environments

Whereas cooperation and collaboration have become two popular words in virtual reality, the problem of cooperative manipulation has been mainly left aside due to the great number of other challenges facing anyone trying to setup multi-user worlds. We define cooperative manipulation as a situation where two or more users interact on the same object in a concurrent but cooperative way. The focus of this paper is to describe an experiment whose goal was to experiment problems specific of cooperative manipulation setups. Those problems include synchronizing user’s input over the network, mapping user’s input into a meaningful 3-D movement thanks to what we call a model of activity and giving him relevant visual information. In this paper, we present a general framework able to take into account these problems.It is compatible with physically simulated objects and has been implemented using Java, VRML and a distributed approach.