The Collaborative Toolkit for Diverse

Welcome to the homepage for the Collaborative Toolkit for Diverse. This is a generic toolkit designed to help bring collaboration to the everyday user. This toolkit provides generic collaboration in many forms. You do not have to modify your existing application in order to use these tools if you developed your application using DIVERSE. This is possible due to the miracle of DSO's written by Lance Arsenault and John Kelso. See the DIVERSE page for more information.

There are two main parts to this collaborative toolkit. The first part is providing avatar support to your virtual world. The second part is item manipulation in the virtual world.

Avatar Support:
You can specify your own models for avatars and can actually see what your colleagues are doing! By using a client server architecture you can add the ability to have avatars join and leave in real time. There are several important features that are also included to help enhance the presence of avatars. First is radar. It is easy to get lost in a virtual world so it is nice to be able to tell where your colleagues are and where they are looking. The next is a collaborative console that provides participant lists that show you who else is in your world. With this list you can jump to a specific user's position, highlight a user's avatar, tether to them, or even jump into their body and look through their eyes!

Item manipulation:
If you are in a virtual world it is nice to dynamically load and manipulate content. This part of the collaborative toolkit is designed to allow you to simply add, remove, and manipulate items in your virtual world. An interesting feature is that you can load an item into the world and if your participants do not have the item it will go out to a webserver and download it for you! This part of the system also uses a client server architecture due to the need for item control.

Screenshots of collaborations that used D_collabtools:

Nanostructure with Cijkl glyphs:	Tactical simulation for the TASC project

Developed at the UVAG ("VT-CAVE")
Summer 2002 - Spring 2003
Current version written and maintained by Andrew A. Ray anray2@vt.edu
Original version was developed by Alex Kalita, Mark Soltys, and Eric Tester and was funded by the TASC Inc project.

A BIG thanks you goes to Ron Kriz, John Kelso, and Lance Arsenault, who were CoPIs on the ONR-NAVCIITI project that funded the development of this project, and Doug Bowman who collaborated on HCI issues in the design of 3D Interfaces!!!