VISUALIZING AND POPULATING THE WEB - COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR BROWSING, SEARCHING AND INHABITING WEBSPACE

This paper presents new services for accessing, exploring and collabor ating via the World Wide Web. These are based on the use of Collaborat ive Virtual Environment (CVE) technology which is used to create navig able 3-D graphical, textual, audio and video representations of the st ructure 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 o n the Web and enabling communication with them; and finally new forms of interface to the Web, based on the notion of ''mixed realities'' wh ich are used to create new forms of boundary between physical and virt ual spaces. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.