Navigating through large virtual worlds or complex data visualizations can be quite difficult, even for experienced users. This difficulty is only exacerbated in telecollaborative endeavors where a user must balance the cognitive demands of tracking collaborators' avatars, engaging in audio and video communication, and navigating oneself, all while attending to the visual content of the environment at hand. This work addresses an important, well-defined, yet heretofore unaddressed need in the domain of telecollaboration: how to effectively coordinate distributed group navigation and viewpoint sharing in three-dimensional environments.

This proposal details four specific deliverables to be completed during the grant period:

0. A detailed, implementation-independent taxonomy of the concepts and techniques of a collaborative assisted navigation system.

1. A flexible, multi-platform implementation based on the designs in

   (1). This implementation will be based on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and Java for maximum portability; a streamlined CAVE version based on Performer and CAVERNsoft will follow if time and funding permit.

2. An in-depth case study of the application of this technology to a real, complex, collaborative problem: the Solar Journey project lead by researchers at Indiana University and the University of Chicago.

3. A formal usability study on the effectiveness of the system, guided by the case study from (3) but based on tasks which are not domain-specific.

Wherever possible, our framework and implementation will seek to incorporate or leverage existing telecollaboration APIs and standards (whether official or defacto), thereby reducing the overall development effort and increasing the possibility that this framework might be adopted as part of the next generation of standards. (Current defacto standards and APIs include open source, VRML/Java-based, multi-user environments such as VNet and DeepMatrix for desktop-to-desktop collaboration, and Performer & CAVERNsoft-based systems like LIMBO for CAVE-based collaboration.)

This technology has the potential to impact many facets of the University's high performance networking initiatives. For the sciences, it can provide new, more convenient ways to share insights into 3D data visualizations; for teaching and learning, it can facilitate distance education and virtual field trips; and for the virtual arts, it can serve as a new tool for guiding the exposition of creative environments. Finally, as a novel and flexible piece of collaborative middleware, this technology should help to heighten the profile of the University as an active contributor to the state of the art, especially within the tele-immersion efforts centered at the Electronic Visualization Lab of the University of Illinois at Chicago.