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A taxonomy for the design and evaluation of Networked Virtual Environments: its application to collaborative design

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Abstract

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are virtual environments that are distributed across two or more physical locations and connected over a network, thereby forming one virtual shared workspace. In the past decade, research in the field of networked virtual environments has become active, quickly growing out of infancy into a diversity of applications. As is common in any new field, this growing assortment of applications lacks an overall classification, making the design of NVEs cumbersome and the comparison of existing environments difficult at best. The goal of this paper is to provide a means of classification through the development of a taxonomy of NVEs. First, an extensive literature review is conducted investigating the characteristics of virtual environments in general, as well as issues specific to networked virtual environments. This search leads to the development of a taxonomy for describing NVEs, which is used to compare current NVE systems and applications and find weak areas in which future work might be most beneficial. Finally, the taxonomy is used for the development of networked virtual environments for collaborative mechanical engineering design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fluor Corporation, Greenville, SC, USA

    Miranda Baladi

  2. New South Companies, Columbia, SC, USA

    Henry Vitali

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Georges Fadel & Joshua Summers

  4. Department of Computer Science, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Andrew Duchowski

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  1. Miranda Baladi
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  2. Henry Vitali
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  3. Georges Fadel
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  4. Joshua Summers
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  5. Andrew Duchowski
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Correspondence to Georges Fadel.

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Baladi, M., Vitali, H., Fadel, G. et al. A taxonomy for the design and evaluation of Networked Virtual Environments: its application to collaborative design. Int J Interact Des Manuf 2, 17–32 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12008-007-0032-2

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