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a Collaborative Virtual Environment |
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CVE is an open-source, multiplatform system for building low-cost collaborative virtual environments. Its primary support and development is taking place at the University of Idaho Department of Computer Science. CVE started life at New Mexico State University with support from NSF grant 0402572.
We want to enable you to build virtual editions of your academic or organizational units. The CVE distributions so far include the NMSU CS department within Science Hall and the University of Idaho CS Department in the Janssen Engineering Building.
The Facilities Office at most colleges and universities have CAD data files with more accurate representations of buildings. These help a Lot if you can get them, however, they are often not public for security reasons. CVE enables you to do a virtual CS department with less, starting from floor plans. Often you do not need to model the entire building. For example, at NMSU we are mainly interested in the 1st Floor, while at Idaho we needed portions of every storey in the building.
Before modeling an entire building, you may want to model just a single room
to get the hang of it.
CVE's first room was NMSU's Programming
Languages, Environments, and Automated Software Engineering Lab,
located in Science Hall Room 167, a 12'x20' room
(ceiling approximately 9' high) with a whiteboard, 4-5 workstations, and
a printer. This demo went through many revisions before expanding to a
department-wide demo.
CVE is free to everyone, under the GPL. Help yourself to the public
distributions, which are not claimed to be finished or polished.
To download and run CVE, follow these instructions:
We welcome source code corrections, bug reports, and offers of collaboration.
svn checkout https://svn.code.sf.net/p/cve/code/trunk/cve
This will create a subdirectory cve under
whatever directory you do it from, so you may want to "cd" somewhere first.