The main challenges in the development of these applications involve design choices, usability concerns, software development and performances issues. A Business Game scenario should allow to further explore the communication needs in negotiation situations. A Travel Rehearsal scenario should allow to explore the specific requirements of very large virtual environments. Details available here . The trials are being carried out in three distinct phases, based on different versions of the demonstrator applications, making an extensive use of ISDN in all phases and introducing higher capacity networking such as ATM in phases 2 and 3.
Usability evaluations have several objectives.
A first objective is to provide support for assessing and revising the design of the applications. More general objectives are to further develop an understanding of CVE technology concepts and to explore and refine the actual usability techniques available for CVE evaluation. Quicktime movies of some trials are available here .