In the past, multiuser virtual environments have been developed as venues for entertainment and social interaction.
Recent research focuses instead on their utility in carrying out work in the real world.
This research has identified the importance of a mapping between the real and the virtual that permits the representation of real tasks in the virtual environment. The system resulting from this mapping, called Promo , permits the modeling and execution of software processes by geographically dispersed agents. The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery.