VR-LAB-a distributed multi-user environment for educational purposes and presentations

Abstract

Distributed work is becoming a major issue for a large part of the work force and distributed collaborative research has almost become the norm. Consequently, distributed communication facilities play an im.-portant role in all future working and education scenarios. Tele-Teaching and Tele-Learning are important new applications for remote data access. Currently mainly focussing on audio-visual communication, TeleEducation has not discovered distributed 30 virtual environments to a large extent. Howeven we firmly believe that the demand for interactive exploration of distributed 30 databases over the internet and for collaboration within virtual 30 environments will soon become one of he driving forces of future deveopments. This paper presents an architecture, called VR-Lab, which embeds a distributed VRML-System and a remote contollable, distributedpresentation environment to support Tele-Learning and education including 30 media.