Visualising and populating the Web: Collaborative virtual environments for browsing, searching and inhabiting Webspace

This paper presents new services for accessing, exploring and collaborating via the World Wide Web. These are based on the use of Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) technology which is used to create navigable 3-D graphical, textual, audio and video representations of the structure of the Web and also of its users. The paper describes a number of different services which address the issues of: browsing the Web; searching the Web; directly representing the presence of other users on the Web and enabling communication with them; and finally new forms of interface to the Web, based on the notion of "mixed realities" which are used to create new forms of boundary between physical and virtual spaces. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.