Effect of Collaboration Mode and Position Arrangement on Immersive Analytics Tasks in Virtual Reality: A Pilot Study

Applied Sciences

Feiyu Lu¹  Lei Chen²  Jialin Wang²  Hai-Ning Liang²  Yong Yue²  Wenjun Chen³ 

[1] Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA;Department of Computing, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou 215123, China;The College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China;

关键词: collaborative exploration;    immersive analytics;    group learning;    virtual reality;    3D mathematics;    3D user interfaces;   

DOI  :  10.3390/app112110473

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

[Background] Virtual reality (VR) technology can provide unique immersive experiences for group users, and especially for analytics tasks with visual information in learning. Providing a shared control/view may improve the task performance and enhance the user experience during VR collaboration. [Objectives] Therefore, this research explores the effect of collaborative modes and user position arrangements on task performance, user engagement, and collaboration behaviors and patterns in a VR learning environment that supports immersive collaborative tasks. [Method] The study involved two collaborative modes (shared and non-shared view and control) and three position arrangements (side-by-side, corner-to-corner, and back-to-back). A user study was conducted with 30 participants divided into three groups (Single, Shared, and Non-Shared) using a VR application that allowed users to explore the structural and transformational properties of 3D geometric shapes. [Results] The results showed that the shared mode would lead to higher task performance than single users for learning analytics tasks in VR. Besides, the side-by-side position got a higher score and more favor for enhancing the collaborative experience. [Conclusion] The shared view would be more suitable for improving task performance in collaborative VR. In addition, the side-by-side position may provide a higher user experience when collaborating in learning VR. From these results, a set of guidelines for the design of collaborative visualizations for VR environments are distilled and presented at the end of the paper. All in all, although our experiment is based on a colocated setting with two users, the results are applicable to both colocated and distributed collaborative scenarios with two or more users.

【 授权许可】

Unknown