Educative distributed virtual environments for children

This paper presents a distributed virtual reality environment for children. This virtual environment supports cooperation among members of a dispersed team engaged in a concurrent context. The virtual environment maintains a shared information space described in a standard Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format. Users are allowed to interact and to give decisions using cooperative mechanisms. A user-friendly interface enables teachers to create their own stories that fit with children pedagogical requirements and generates new virtual environments according to teacher´s specifications. The implementation is based on DeepMatrix as environment server, VRML and Java as languages and Cortona VRML plug-in from ParallelGraphics. It is actually running on the Internet: http://www.enib.fr/eve.