1 Collaborative Augmented Reality Environments: Integrating VR, Working Materials, and Distributed Work Spaces

This paper describes Manufaktur, a prototype of a concept and infrastructure that goes beyond the classical CVE systems toward a collaborative augmented reality environment, where users’ documents and objects appear as live representations in a 3D workspace. Manufaktur supports collaborative, distributed work across platforms. It provides the possibility of display on the MS Windows and the SGI IRIX platforms with mono and stereo-graphic displays ranging from a monitor built into a table to a Holobench. The emphasis is on representing the materials with which people are working, and the actions they are taking with them, and far less on the visual representation, e.g. through ava-tars, of the collaborating persons. It seeks to facilitate users ’ col-lective self-organisation of environments, spaces and traces that embody the trajectory of their work