US Patent 11032328 Asymmetric collaborative virtual environments

Systems and methods for facilitating virtual collaboration between users within virtual environments are disclosed. A plurality of users access a collaborative virtual environment system using interface devices with varying capabilities to establish a virtual collaboration session in which users communicate via a bidirectional real-time communication channel and interact within a virtual environment. Annotations or other user interactions within the virtual environment are automatically propagated to each user in the virtual collaboration session in order to facilitate collaboration. Data from such virtual collaboration sessions may be captured for later use.