We believe intelligence does not dwell solely in brain but emerges from active interactions with environments through perception, action, and communication. This paper give an overview of our five years project on Cooperative Distributed Vision (CDV, in short). From a practical point of view, the goal of CDV is summarized as follows: Embed in the real world a group of network-connected Observation Stations (real-time image processor with active camera(s)) and mobile robots with vision. And realize 1) wide area dynamic scene understanding and 2) versatile scene visualization. Applications of CDV include real-time wide area surveillance, remote conference and lecturing systems, navigation of (non-intelligent) mobile robots and disabled people. In this paper, we first define the framework of CDV and then present technical research results so far obtained: 1) fixed viewpoint pan-tilt-zoom camera for wide area active imaging, 2) active vision system for real-time moving object tracking and, 3) cooperative moving object tracking by communicating active vision agents.