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 avatars, of the collaborating persons. It seeks to facilitate users? collective self-organisation of environments, spaces and traces that embody the trajectory of their work.