IBM Watson Research Center

Project: Olympus Researchers: Li-Te Cheng, Steven Rohall, Sadat Shami, Andrew Sempere, John Patterson, Lesley Fleishman, Adam Schwartz, and Lushen Wu Olympus is a research project investigating how avatars can enhance meetings around web content. Instead of bringing users into an immersive virtual world, this project overlays avatars and visualizations on top of existing web-based meeting services or an arbitrary web page. The research team has developed a Flash-based prototype and is currently running a field study with distributed teams within IBM. This work is the successor to Bluegrass, an earlier virtual worlds project that explored integrating a full 3-D virtual world within the Rational Jazz Team Concert development environment.