Marvin: Supporting Awareness through Audio in Collaborative Virtual Environments

This paper describes Marvin, an awareness support agent written in Java. The system provides audio cues, text-to-voice and voice recognition, and currently operates as a bot in ActiveWorlds, an Internet-based, shared 3D virtual environment. The ActiveWorlds space was designed to facilitate chance encounters between members of distributed work groups, and Marvin was written to overcome the problems that arose in use. Audio allows us to free the user from both attending to the screen, and also from being present at only one virtual location within the world, drastically enhancing the chances of encounter. It also blurs the boundaries between the virtual and physical workplace.