A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a distributed, virtual reality designed to support collaborative activities. It is a topic of increasing interest to large global corporations, where work teams are often distributed over a large geographic area. Aimed at anyone involved in researching the design of tools for supporting distributed teams of workers, it helps the reader understand the latest technology, state-of-the-art research, and good working practice. Among the topics covered are: systems aspects of CVEs; user centered aspects of environment design; and methodologies for iterative evaluation and design.