Abstract
This paper presents the SLMeetingRoom, a virtual reality online environment to support group meetings of geographically dispersed participants. A prototype was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach using the Second Life platform. Ten additional components had to be added to Second Life environment to support group work essential activities such as participants’ communication, tasks’ and participants’ coordination, participants’ collaboration and work evolution’s perception. Empirical studies, both pilot and experiment, were developed comparing four different meeting settings: face-to-face, videoconference, stand Second Life and SLMeetingRoom. The study involved graduate students enrolled in the Interface and Multimedia discipline at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Brazil. Results indicated that groups working within SLMeetingRoom environment presented similar results as face-to-face meeting as far as sense of presence is concerned and with low cognitive effort. Task completion and degree of participation were not affected by the meeting set up. It was concluded that Second Life, in conjunction with the SLMeetingRoom components, is a good tool for holding synchronous remote meetings and coexists with other electronic meeting technologies.
Highlights
When people act in groups the resulting synergy usually produces better results than work undertaken individually because together they can seek ideas and information to help resolve problems
H1(alternative hypothesis): A group using a meeting environment implemented according to SLMeetingRoom model should, at the end of the meeting, show a greater degree of task completion, participation, sense of presence and lower cognitive effort than groups using only Second Life and traditional videoconferencing systems
Given that Second Life was not created with electronic meeting system (EMS) characteristics, we designed an enriched environment, called the SLMeetingRoom model, which is composed of ten essential meeting support functionalities to cover communication, coordination, cooperation and perception needs of working in groups
Summary
When people act in groups the resulting synergy usually produces better results than work undertaken individually because together they can seek ideas and information to help resolve problems. According to (Olivier and Pinkwart, 2007), SL covers most of the essential aspects of synchronous communication that is so important in the CSCW area, such as direct chat, instantaneous messages, voice conversations, gestures, internal groups, etc It makes it possible to expand the limits of remote interaction through 3D models that offer excellent potential for new forms of interaction, cooperation and socialization. The choice of the necessary components for the SLMeetingRoom model was based on three pilot studies that used SL to hold meetings Through these experiments we observed that the greatest difficulty in using SL to hold meetings, lay in the lack of the even the most basic tool to support work meetings in order to conduct activities aimed at achieving the groups objectives. Their participation was anonymous and we were looking for the aggregate behavior of the
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