Virtual environments for work, study and leisure

Virtual environments have the potential of adding a new dimension to the concept of a community. In this paper, we describe our work on a text-based virtual environment. Although our focus is on work applications, the environment is equally suited for educational and recreational uses. The paper is presented in the context of the needs of a software development team but can be applied to other work teams as well. Two essential characteristics of successful work teams are good communication and efficient access to project information. Maintaining both of these becomes more and more difficult as the size of the team grows, and gets very difficult when the team is geographically dispersed. We describe a project that could be used to test the hypothesis that a collaborative environment using text-based virtual reality would alleviate these problems by relieving physical separation through virtual proximity. In the first phase of the project, we adapted and extended Jersey, a Smalltalk-based MOO (Multi-user domain Object Oriented) with collaborative virtual environment (CVE) features. On the basis of our experience, we then started designing and implementing MUM, a Multi-Universe MOO. When completed, the more extendable and customisable MUM will provide novel features and encourage developer experimentation. We describe some of MUM's features and our plans for it.