Virtual and Augmented Reality supporting group consciousness within collaborative working environments

The economical changes of the last decade, as well as the new customer patterns and global competitiveness demand new methods and tools that will increase the creativity and innovation of the knowledge workers. While the focus in the past was on how to improve the organizations, the current dynamics render the old methods unusable. What is needed are the methods to support the inter-personal communication and productivity in order to maintain a higher level of knowledge entropy that can eventually lead to increase in new ideas. This paper presents a vision of a virtual space of networked individuals, based on Virtual & Augmented Reality, forming ad-hoc groups on the basis of common interests. The basic idea is how to connect people and concepts together, what methods to use, and how to make the collaboration and the exchange of information more fluent and easier to handle. Important issues like how to link collaborative resources together or how to discover new resources within the population of a virtual community and browsing through the people-concepts maps, within a VAR environment, are discussed. A possible platform to stimulate creativity and innovation is envisaged. The paper looks into later collaborative environments and their benefits into providing much faster and broader access to existing knowledge and people know-how, thus providing more tools and new technologies to professionals engaged into knowledge intensive work. New concepts like Augmented Reality are proposed as alternative environment for deploying applications supporting the individual and group collaboration work. The new framework is described and a plan for setting a small empirical study is analysed covering the issues of interaction and collaboration in education and training. This paper is trying to find the methods that can be used first for the evaluation and later for deployment of new tools and techniques that will improve the creativity and innovation within online collaboration sessions. The benefits of the research include providing more supportive, appealing and communicative applications by applying various design theories and practices into virtual enterprise system development. The paper concludes by introducing a new scientific domain branded “Knowledge Connection” which stands at the crossroads of existing scientific domains such as Knowledge Creation, Representation and Visualisation, Collaborative or Shared Workspace., and Virtual & Augmented Reality.