Overview

This page gives anoverview about some of my projects a mainly did during my time at the University. My ongoing research can be found at http://www.nicve.salford.ac.uk.

PhD Thesis: (download PDF Version)

In an increasingly global economy there is rising pressure to expand collaboration from co-located to geographically distributed groups. Currently natural human interaction is not well supported between people collaborating across a distance. This negatively impacts on the feeling and performance of collaboration. Cooperative working could be better supported by richer mediums with more natural interfaces that allow people to interact with shared objects and each other as if they were co-located. For example, intention and opinion must be communicated, while synchronously manipulating shared artefacts. Transferring the straightforwardness of such collaboration onto distributed teams is challenging. Various forms of teleconferencing systems attempt to offer such support, yet they have difficulties with sharing objects and the direct social response this involves when participants interact with those objects. My work demonstrates that a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) can assist such cooperation and that immersive displays are of greater help compared with the traditional desktop interfaces to bring us closer to replicating a face-to-face interaction. The effectiveness of application of this technology depends on a complex set of factors that determine the efficiency of collaboration. This work examines these factors and their interrelationships within the framework of a taxonomy focussed on supporting closely-coupled collaboration using immersive CVEs.

Master Thesis: (download PDF Version)

"Enhancement of the scalability of an infrastructure for support of a large scale virtual and agent environment" in the context of the COMRIS Project at the University of Reading (UK)
The dramatic improvements in global interconnectivity due to intranets, extranets, and the Internet has led to an explosion in the number and variety of new data-intensive applications. One of these applications are virtual reality systems, with their virtual environments. Current research in large-scale virtual environments can link hundreds of people and artificial agents with interactive three-dimensional (3D) graphics, massive terrain databases, global hypermedia and scientific datasets. One of these research projects is the Co-Habited Mixed Reality Information Spaces (COMRIS). A variety of network elements is required to scale up this virtual environment to an arbitrarily large size and simultaneously connecting thousands of interacting agents. The goal of this work is to show which elements can be used to enhance the scalability of the communication infrastructure. It is showing a generic overview of different design possibilities like the ring or the hypercube topology.

Database projects:

- Fachbereichsdatenbank (FBDB) at the Department of Engineering I of the FHTW Berlin
This is a complex database with an Intranet interface based on the programming language ASP. You can search over this site any person at the FB1 from the University of Applied Sciences Berlin. In this sites you will be find additional information about the students and the staff. Another part from this interface is the job presentation for students, they can find about this site a practical or a final project theme.
The whole database is easy to administrate about an own Intranet interface, the administrator can change or add any kind of information.

- Intranet of the gedas GmbH
To simplify ways and to be able to enforce tasks more quickly, the internal administration of the gedas GmbH use the intranet to do that.
My task was is to administrate and to expand the intranet. We used almost exclusively the programming language ASP and SQL.

Java Projects:

a Shufflegame at Java
I had programmed a little Java 2 game in my object oriented design course in the 7. semester. You can run this game under every operating system with Java.

other:

a short LaTeX documentation (only in German)
This little documentation offers you a short insight to the possibilities and the abilities of LaTeX, which under Unix systems find a big spread.