Abstract
Shared virtual environments (SVEs) have been researched extensively within the fields of education, entertainment, work, and training, yet there has been limited research on the creative and collaborative aspects of interactivity in SVEs. The important role that creativity and collaboration play in human society raises the question of the way that virtual working spaces might be designed to support collaborative creativity in SVEs. In this paper, we outline an SVE named LeMo, which allows two people to collaboratively create a short loop of music together. Then we present a study of LeMo, in which 52 users composed music in pairs using four different virtual working space configurations. Key findings indicated by results include: (i) Providing personal space is an effective way to support collaborative creativity in SVEs, (ii) personal spaces with a fluid light-weight boundary could provide enough support, worked better and was preferable to ones with rigid boundaries and (iii) a configuration that provides a movable personal space was preferred to one that provided no mobility. Following these findings, five corresponding design implications for shared virtual environments focusing on supporting collaborative creativity are given and conclusions are made.
Highlights
The real world envelops us with space that we share with others; in this surrounding environment, we perceive rich sensory information about objects and events happening around us
Territory and territoriality in collaboration (SVEs and Tabletop) In a previous study, we found collaborators formed both personal and group territory during collaborative music making in an shared virtual environments (SVEs), and they had territorial behaviour, e.g., most musical edits were done inside personal territories (Men & Bryan-Kinns, 2019)
Counterbalancing the learning effect As aforementioned, we introduced a fully randomised order of experimental conditions to counterbalance the learning effect. It turned out many measurements in the Post-Session Questionnaire were still affected by the sequence to a certain extent, as shown in Fig. 5, in which data from all groups were compiled according to how the group was ordered in the session sequence
Summary
The real world envelops us with space that we share with others; in this surrounding environment, we perceive rich sensory information about objects and events happening around us. One of the earliest examples are digital games, e.g., Star Trek created in early 1970s provides a computational space that players can visit and experience through text descriptions on a computer screen, see (Case, Ploog & Fantino, 1990). Though these non-immersive media can involve people to a very high level and generate the experience of flow, few of them have enabled people to interact in a natural way that is similar to the way that people
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