Disruptions to shared mental models from poor quality of service in collaborative virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments are being used in various applications ranging from online games to complex team training scenarios. The key to the success of such environments is the ability of the participants to form a shared mental model of the collaborative task being performed. Poor quality of service can deteriorate user performance and quality of experience, leading to a disruption of this mental model. While the effects of quality of service have been analyzed for traditional desktop environments, these effects remain unclear in collaborative virtual environments during user-to-user interactions. Here, we analyze the role of latency and packet bursts, two common problems in collaborative applications, on both simulator perception and actual task performance in a collaborative fire-fighting simulator. This exploratory study indicates that large latencies have a significant (p < 0.05) impact on the quality of experience, but not task performance. In contrast, packet bursts have a much larger impact on both the quality of experience and performance. Additionally, the network role, such as whether a user is a client or server, showed a significant (p < 0.05) impact on task performance in conditions impaired by packet bursts.

Working Together on Diverse Tasks: A Longitudinal Study on Individual Workload, Presence and Emotional Recognition in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Numerous studies have shown the potential benefits of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) for distributed teams. However, there are few longitudinal studies on collaboration in immersive virtual environments, and existing studies mostly examine how pairs or groups adapt over time. In a longitudinal study, we examined what does and does not change over time as individual users adapt to collaboration in virtual environments. In our mixed-methods, exploratory study, we matched 20 participants in random pairs over five sessions. We assigned each participant to complete a different collaborative task, with a different partner, in each session. Our quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview data show that adaptation to VR increased significantly over time. Presence ratings did not show change over time, but participants reported developing new ways to communicate in VR. We also identified patterns indicating a relationship between a person’s emotional state and their partner’s ability to recognize their emotion. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and provide design implications and future directions for designers and researchers in the field.

LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments: Current State and Utilization Perspective

Recent advances in the field of web technologies, including the increasing support of virtual reality hardware, have allowed for shared virtual environments, reachable by just entering a URL in a browser. One contemporary solution that provides such a shared virtual reality is LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments (LIRKIS G-CVE). It is a web-based software system, built on top of the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks. This paper describes LIRKIS G-CVE and introduces its two original components. The first one is the Smart-Client Interface, which turns smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, into input devices. The advantage of this component over the standard way of user input is demonstrated by a series of experiments. The second component is the Enhanced Client Access layer, which provides access to positions and orientations of clients that share a virtual environment. The layer also stores a history of connected clients and provides limited control over the clients. The paper also outlines an ongoing experiment aimed at an evaluation of LIRKIS G-CVE in the area of virtual prototype testing.