Abstract
[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.
Highlights
Advances in immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), have provided another great platform for immersive analytics tasks [1,2]
Because of its inherent affordance to support the interaction with visual–spatial elements, VR is a viable platform for the collaborative analysis of visual data for sense-making and knowledge acquisition activities
This paper presents the following main contributions: (1) an exploration of the task performance, engagement level, and collaboration behaviors and patterns of users in a VR environment that deals with visualizations; (2) an investigation into the effects of private/personal and public virtual workspace and virtual proxemics relationships and arrangements; (3) an understanding of the positive affordances and limitations of shared
Summary
Advances in immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), have provided another great platform for immersive analytics tasks [1,2]. Virtual reality learning environments (VRLE) play an important role in assisting and promoting learning performance. It can provide students with a rich and tailored personalized learning environment, which allows them to experience the situational and intuitive presentation of knowledge and improves their internal motivation. Because of its inherent affordance to support the interaction with visual–spatial elements, VR is a viable platform for the collaborative analysis of visual data for sense-making and knowledge acquisition activities. In education applications, research suggests that VR is a suitable collaborative tool because it can support social interactions and experimental, constructivist-based learning in more natural and immersive ways [8,9]
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