This paper presents a novel interactive visualization technique that helps in gathering insights from large volumes of text generated through dyadic communications. The emphasis is specifically on showing content evolution and modification with passage of time. The challenge lies in presenting not only the content as a stand-alone but also understand how the present is related to the past. For example analyzing large volumes of emails can show how communication among a set of people have progressed or evolved over time, may be along with the roles of the communicators. It can also show how the content has changed or evolved. In order to depict the changes, the email repositories are first clustered using a novel algorithm. The clusters are further time-stamped and correlated. User-insights are provided through visualization of these clusters. Results of implementation over two different datasets are presented.

Animation plays a key role in adding realism to any graphical environment. In this work we present a technique for animating multiple avatars in a virtual environment designed to support remote collaboration between distributed work teams in which users are represented by avatars. There will be long periods of time when the user is not actively controlling the avatar and working on his official task. We need to animate his avatar with a `working-at-desk' animation that should be non-looping and sufficiently random for a single avatar as well as between multiple avatars to appear realistic. We present a technique for generating multiple head motions using (a) nonlinear dimensionality reduction and (b) gaze space images to control the motion. Our technique can automatically generate long sequences of motion without any user intervention. We present results from synthetic data.

This paper describes a conference which linked several remote sites via a virtual environment so that the virtual audience could follow the presentations and interact with real presenters. The aim was to assess the feasibility of linking distributed virtual audiences to an ongoing conference event. Various types of data about the conference were gathered, such as participant observations, interviews and a survey of the audience, and analyzed. The main finding is that a number of `low tech' improvements could be made that could greatly enhance this type of virtual conferencing. A related finding is that the visual fidelity of the environment and of the avatars plays a lesser role than other factors such as audio quality. Given the paucity of research on how virtual conferencing can substitute for travel, plus the urgency of this topic for environmental reasons, a number of suggestions are made for the implementation of remote virtual conference participation.

In this paper, we present a novel system for enhancing enterprise virtual worlds by supplying information about real-world events and activities at near real-time. With more enterprises realizing the commercial benefits of virtual worlds, the requirement for spontaneous replication of the real-world has become essential. In the proposed system, we detect and classify different real-life human activities using a visual surveillance system and then send corresponding relevant information as inputs to a virtual world server. The virtual world server uses this information to reproduce these activities in the virtual environment. We have used the office model of our lab and recreated human activities and movements with near real spontaneity.