Warping distributed system configurations

We have developed interface animation techniques for distributed collaborative 3D virtual environments. Our methods communicate information about group interactions to the various individual users in the system; this information is traditionally absent (i.e., not needed) from single user systems and is difficult to convey with static interfaces. Interface animation is primarily accomplished by dynamically warping the shape of the objects in the virtual space. We describe our warping methods and a system, call MUVEE in which we have embedded them. We also describe an application of these ideas for configuring distributed systems in general: visualizing the configuration and performance of a distributed system as a warpable virtual environment. We have implemented our experimental prototypes with the Polylith toolbus.