Narrowcasting Attributes for Presence Awareness in Collaborative Virtual Environments

This article describes presence awareness in groupware systems. Presence awareness is rapidly becoming an important component of many collaborative applications. One serious limitation is that no existing presence awareness systems can handle multiply present sources and sinks. The narrowcasting operations presented this article suggest elegant solution for such multipresence environments. These operations comprise an idiom for selective attention, presence awareness, and privacy-- an infrastructure for rich conferencing capabilities in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). We have developed two interfaces for narrowcasting operations and presence awareness in CVEs: for workstation and 2.5- and 3rd-generation mobile phones. Such platform-agnostic deployment of narrowcasting operations encourages the modernization of office- and mobilebased conferencing, leveraging session integration across coextensive spaces and anticipating multipresence enabled by higher bandwidth and more durable mobile connectivity. Keywords: mobile computing, multiuser interface, narrowcasting functions, teleconferencing, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs).