A social metaphor-based 3D virtual environment

Our design goal for OnLive Traveler was to develop a virtual
community system that emulates natural social paradigms,
allowing the participants to sense a tele-presence, the subjective
sensation that remote users are actually co-located within a
virtual space. Once this level of immersive "sense of presence"
and engagement is achieved, we believe an enhanced level of
socialization, learning, and communication are achievable.
OnLive Traveler is a client-server application allowing realtime
synchronous communication between individuals over the
Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a
shared virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by
avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multipoint,
full duplex voice, managed by the server.
We examine a number of very specific design and
implementation decisions that were made to achieve this goal
within platform constraints. We also will detail some observed
results gleaned from the virtual community and virtual learning
user-base, which has been using Traveler for several years.
© ACM, 2003. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive
version was published in International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Pages 1-2. (2003)
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/965106.965134