Scientific collaboration in virtual environments: The western consortium watershed analysis, visualization, and exploration (WC-WAVE) project

Virtual environments (VEs) are conducive to collaborative work in many areas of human activity, from education, training, and entertainment, to industrial design, command-and-control, and medical applications. This talk focuses on using VEs for enhancing collaboration in scientific endeavors, in particular in research efforts pertaining to environmental sciences. A brief overview of work done at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) on using VEs to support scientific discovery is presented first. Then, an NSF EPSCoR-funded project that relies substantially on using VEs for collaborative scientific work is introduced. This project, the Western Consortium Watershed Analysis, Visualization, and Exploration (WC-WAVE) [1, 2], developed jointly by scientists, engineers, and educators from Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico has as its core a VE-based cyber-infrastructure (CI) centerpiece, the Virtual Watershed. Details of the Virtual Watershed´s design and current implementation status are also provided, together with an outline of planned future work. The talk concludes with an assessment of the challenges of using VEs in projects such as WC-WAVE and a discussion of possible solutions for addressing them.