(1996) CALVIN is a CAVEŽ architectural application featuring networked avatars as well as head-controlled user-interface and speech recognition.
Demonstrated in the GII Testbed of Supercomputing '95, as "A Multi-Perspective Approach to Collaborative Design in Persistent Networked Virtual Environments", the approach was to create a persistent virtual world, like for example, a virtual laboratory that remote collaborators could enter and leave at will to collectively work on a design or visualization project.
Unlike other virtual environments that present the same view to all its participants, this approach provided each participant with his/her own perspective that visualized the information in a manner most relevant to their area of expertise. For example in the field of architectural design two collaborators might be an architect and a mechanical engineer. While the architect is more concerned with aesthetic issues of the design, the engineer might be more interested in stress analysis of the design. Although they share the same virtual world, the representations of the architecture they see should be decidedly different so that information relevant to each expert can be appropriately depicted.
Many of the applications in the GII Testbed focused on connecting supercomputing resources to VR devices to visualize data from specific scientific problem domains.
CALVIN, however, focused on researching the techniques required to support general collaborative work in persistent virtual environments. These techniques include providing: representations for virtual co-presence; video and audio teleconferencing; virtual VR interfaces; and database technology for sustaining persistence in virtual worlds.
