Collaborative Environments Aspects in Communication and Educational Visualisation 2003

Abstract:  This thesis examines several technical and educational aspects in collaborative environments. Collaborative environments help multiple users to share and modify data objects in real-time although the users themselves may not be present at the same physical location. The users of the collaborative environment form a group in which they can exchange information about the state and updates of shared objects. As existing applications in collaborative virtual environments show, supporting large scale collaborative environments and providing users with a notion of consistency on the shared objects is difficult. The physical distance between users can be large and the state of objects can be complex. Thus there is only a limited possibility to transmit the shared state and propagate state changes between users. Moreover, objects can change as a function of time, i.e. objects can change their state even without any update involved. Another aspect, affecting the scalability of collaborative environments, is the organisation of membership for users and the