Overview of Collaborative Virtual Environments using Augmented Reality

Abstract

Using a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) can reduce the barriers of remote communication, which makes CVEs being increasingly used to support collaborative work between spatially dispersed collaborators. Augmented reality (AR) builds a bridge between working in real and virtual environment, which makes AR a candidate technology to implement CVEs. To structure this research field and to identify possible lacks of research, this paper proposes a design space of CVEs using AR. Therefore, we mapped described solutions in research literature onto the CVE's definition, which considers user-roles as well as benefits gained by AR. Additionally, we concentrate on the consistency of using specific keywords in the field. By means of the gained design space, we identified certain gaps in research and present potential next research topics in the field.