Performance and usability of a shared spaces trial

There is a growing interest in shared virtual environments, or shared spaces. These are multi-user, computer-generated three-dimensional worlds where people can roam freely and interact with each other and objects in the world. Such environments allow distant users to come together in a common virtual place and communicate with each other, from their computer terminal at home or in the office via a network connection. These features make shared spaces an interesting platform for supporting such concepts as virtual reality teleconferencing or inhabited TV. Very little work has been done to understand the implications of the people using them. In the research community, there have been some projects to study such aspects as user movements in a virtual world and these results have been used to improve the design of shared spaces applications. Extending this work, BT Laboratories have carried out a project in which they investigated both the technical and human aspects of shared spaces applications. The work was concluded by a large-scale experiment called The Mirror, run in parallel to a TV programme, in which a significant amount of data was collected and analysed. This paper reviews the technical side of The Mirror and examines its overall architecture. Some results about the performance of the systems were obtained using conventional measurement and analysis methods and these are presented