Collaborative Virtual Environments Research Articles

Smart Factory Using Virtual Reality and Online Multi-User: Towards a Metaverse for Experimental Frameworks

Virtual reality (VR) has been brought closer to the general public over the past decade as it has become increasingly available for desktop and mobile platforms. As a result, consumer-grade VR may redefine how people learn by creating an engaging “hands-on” training experience. Today, VR applications leverage rich interactivity in a virtual environment without real-world consequences to optimize training programs in companies and educational institutions. Therefore, the main objective of this article was to improve the collaboration and communication practices in 3D virtual worlds with VR and metaverse focused on the educational and productive sector in smart factory. A key premise of our work is that the characteristics of the real environment can be replicated in a virtual world through digital twins, wherein new, configurable, innovative, and valuable ways of working and learning collaboratively can be created using avatar models. To do so, we present a proposal for the development of an experimental framework that constitutes a crucial first step in the process of formalizing collaboration in virtual environments through VR-powered metaverses. The VR system includes functional components, object-oriented configurations, advanced core, interfaces, and an online multi-user system. We present the study of the first application case of the framework with VR in a metaverse, focused on the smart factory, that shows the most relevant technologies of Industry 4.0. Functionality tests were carried out and evaluated with users through usability metrics that showed the satisfactory results of its potential educational and commercial use. Finally, the experimental results show that a commercial software framework for VR games can accelerate the development of experiments in the metaverse to connect users from different parts of the world in real time.

Design Reviews in Immersive and Non-Immersive Collaborative Virtual Environments: Comparing Verbal Communication Structures

AbstractThe paper explores the differences between immersive and non-immersive collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) during design reviews. Based on ten reviews with one designer and two reviewers, the study shows that CVEs affect verbal communication structure. More specifically, teams usually talked less, and reviewers exchanged significantly more turn sequences in immersive than in non-immersive CVEs. Regardless of the environment, most turn sequences were related to the designer, who usually talked the most. These findings contribute to the understanding of CVEs in virtual teams.

Collaborative Virtual Learning Environments Through the Contemporary Visual Arts

Collaborative Virtual Learning Environments Through the Contemporary Visual Arts

Geography Education in a Collaborative Virtual Environment: A Qualitative Study on Geography Teachers

The presented study aspires to utilize the gradually validated immense potential of collaborative immersive virtual environments (CIVEs) in higher education when designing and conducting geography lessons. These particular lessons focused on hypsography. A Research through Design approach and relevant qualitative methodology were used as we engaged two groups of domain experts (experienced geography teachers) to validate both the learning scenarios and the virtual environment we used. The lessons were administered via eDIVE—a novel platform for collaborative learning and teaching in virtual reality of our own design. The teachers underwent a hypsography virtual lesson and were randomly divided into two groups to be compared, which differed in the level of structure given to the lesson (one group received detailed instructions on what task they were to solve, while the other was given a free hand in exploring the environment and activities it afforded). The teachers’ experiences were then summarized in a post-lesson reflection and a subsequent focus group following the tasks. The participants’ expertise allowed insights to be gained into their first-hand experience as students, as well as their expert view of the lesson from an educational point of view. Virtual reality’s implementation into teaching practice was the key topic of the discussion.

INC-Hg: An Intelligent Collaborative Haptic-Gripper Virtual Reality System

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) have shown potential to be an effective social skill training platform for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to learn and practice collaborative and communication skills through peer interactions. However, most existing CVE systems require that appropriately matched partners be available at the same time to promote interaction, which limits their applicability to some community settings due to scheduling constraints. A second shortcoming of these more naturalistic peer-based designs is the intensive resources required to manually code the unrestricted conversations that occurred during the peer-based interactions. To preserve the benefits of CVE-based platforms and mitigate some of the resource limitations related to peer availability, we developed an Intelligent Collaborative Haptic-Gripper System (INC-Hg). This system provides an intelligent agent partner who can understand, communicate, and haptically interact with the user, without requiring the presence of another human peer. The INC-Hg operates in real time and thus is able to perform collaborative training tasks at any time and at the user's pace. INC-Hg can also record the real-time data regarding spoken language and task performance, thereby greatly reducing the resource burden of communication and interaction performance analysis. A preliminary usability study with 10 participants with ASD (ages 8–12 years) indicated that the system could classify the participant's utterances into five classes with an accuracy of 70.34%, which suggested the potential of INC-Hg to automatically recognize and analyze conversational content. The results also indicated high accuracies of the agent to initiate a conversation (97.56%) and respond to the participants (86.52%), suggesting the capability of the agent to conduct proper conversations with the participants. Compared to the results of human-to-human collaborative tasks, the human-to-agent mode achieved higher average collaborative operation ratio (61% compared to 40%) and comparable average frequencies for Initiations and Responses among the participants with ASD. These results offer preliminary support as well as areas of improvement regarding the agent's ability to respond to participants, work with participants to complete tasks, engage in back-and-forth conversations, and support the potential of the agent to be a useful partner for individuals with ASD completing CVE tasks.

Impact of online education on student emotional well-being

The shift to full online education has resulted in tremendous changes, such as creation of virtual classrooms, digital collaboration and distance learning. Students not only had to learn how to participate in virtual collaborative environments, but they are still adjusting to new methods of learning and using technology. Conducting online classes and exams at translation and interpreting studies is all the more challenging due to their interdisciplinary nature and a variety of generic and soft skills that suddenly need to be exercised online. Hence, after posing two research questions, it can be initially hypothesized that the digital transformation of education has an impact on students from an emotional point of view as well. Namely, it was visible that students dealt with the new arisen situation as well as with educational and social challenges in different ways and by expressing various emotional responses. This study aims to explore the ways in which tele-education affects student emotions and whether it influences their emotional well-being. For the purpose of this study, survey research was conducted among 91 students at undergraduate translation and interpreting studies in North Macedonia who were given the opportunity to explain how they personally dealt with educational novelties and challenges. The responses indicate whether students experience emotional consequences of (extended) online education. Based on the survey results, conclusions can be made about future practices that would benefit translation and interpreting students from an emotional point of view. / Keywords: online education, distance learning, emotional well-being, emotionally charged words, translation and interpreting studies

Working Together Apart through Embodiment

Computer-mediated collaboration has long been a core research interest in CSCW and HCI. As online social spaces continue to evolve towards more immersive and higher fidelity experiences, more research is still needed to investigate how emerging novel technology may foster and support new and more nuanced forms and experiences of collaboration in virtual environments. Using 30 interviews, this paper focuses on what people may collaborate on and how they collaborate in social Virtual Reality (VR). We broaden current studies on computer-mediated collaboration by highlighting the importance of embodiment for co-presence and communication, replicating offline collaborative activities, and supporting the seamless interplay of work, play, and mundane experiences in everyday lives for experiencing and conceptualizing collaboration in emerging virtual environments. We also propose potential design implications that could further support everyday collaborative activities in social VR

Comparing design review outcomes in immersive and non-immersive collaborative virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) such as virtual reality (VR) technologies have great potential to support design reviews. They enable users to view a design (solution) under review and simultaneously represent team members with social cues such as avatars. However, while CVEs are promising for design practice and education, it is still unclear how they affect review outcomes. This study presents an experiment that compares 10 three-member teams during design review sessions conducted within two different CVEs. The first CVE is non-immersive, that is, a collaborative computer-aided design (CAD) tool used on a conventional desktop interface, while the second CVE is immersive and employs three head-mounted display VR headsets. The results show that teams in immersive CVE identify fewer issues than the teams in non-immersive CVE. Furthermore, although the reviewed designs exhibit a similar level of complexity, the results show that the distribution of issues in immersive CVE was slightly different than the distribution in non-immersive CVE. These results suggest that teams might perform better when using collaborative CAD than collaborative VR when the review goal is to identify as many issues as possible. However, the decision on which CVE to employ should depend on the design under review, as the two technologies might support reviews of different types of designs.

Evaluating the effect of displaying team vs. individual metrics on team performance

This work explores the assessment dimension of persistent feedback to a team, i.e., how presenting feedback based on individual scores vs. team scores vs. both (I&T) affects team performance and team dynamics of a three-person team. Various studies have attempted to determine which level of feedback interdependence (i.e., individual vs. team vs. I&T), presented within a collaborative context, produced optimal team performance. The studies have shown mixed results. Precisely 117 participants (39 three-person Teams) conducted a modified version of the Multiple Errands Test known as the Team Multiple Errands Test (TMET). The teams performed the TMET within a virtual desktop environment. They performed the task in three real-time persistent feedback conditions: Individual, Team, and I&T. Overall, the feedback condition seemed to influence the speed with which team members completed the task. Specifically, the results indicated that individuals in the Team feedback condition moved more quickly through the task than individuals in the I&T feedback condition. There were no significant differences between the Individual condition and the Team or I&T conditions. We suggest that user interface (UI) designers developing persistent feedback for a virtual collaborative training environment should primarily present feedback based on team assessment, as opposed to the I&T assessment, and to be cautious of information overload.

Learning in immersed collaborative virtual environments: design and implementation

ABSTRACT Immersive virtual environments hold unexplored potential to scaffold and stimulate learning in multiple ways for the purpose of increasing potential learning gains. Yet, the number of implementations in educational settings remains very limited. One reason for limited implementation of immersive virtual environment applications may be a lack of recommendations for their effective design. Building on an extensive theoretical framework, this paper provides such recommendations, specific to immersive educational settings. The recommendations are divided into strategies to optimize cognitive load, foster collaborative learning, leverage platform-specific affordances, mitigate platform-specific limitations and to obtain additional benefits. We illustrate the implementation of these recommendations using a novel collaborative virtual reality environment shown to yield learning gains in two prior studies. Moreover, we detail how a non-invasive and cost-effective feature of automated performance analysis can monitor learning gains in collaborative virtual reality environments. The recommendations based on the example of a collaborative virtual reality environment pave the way for more such implementations to maximize benefits for learners and educators alike.

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.

Learning with ICT Tools: A New Challenge in the Times of COVID-19 in Students of Universidad Nacional, Chorotega Branch

In the field of educational research, the teaching process in times a pandemic has undergone a global transformation, establishing the support of virtual tools as an essential axis. The process of teaching supported by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has crossed in all contours and in multiple educational horizons, from informal to formal learning. The objective of this article was to know the learning with ICT tools and the level of perception around the realization of courses in virtual modality, during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this, a quantitative study was carried out with a sample of 115 students from the National University of Costa Rica (UNA), Chorotega Branch Campus, using a sampling technique, not probabilistic, for convenience with a descriptive and explanatory study. The conclusions of this study show an acceptable level in learning with ICT tools and an adaptability to virtuality in terms of the study of student learning in balance with the traditional or face-to-face teaching model. Furthermore, its integration into a collaborative virtual environment is not easy.

Lessons learned from requirements gathering for virtual reality simulators

BackgroundThis paper shows how current collaborative virtual environments (VEs) such as Mozilla Hubs and AltspaceVR can aid in the task of requirements gathering in VR for simulation and training. MethodsWe performed a qualitative study on our use of these technologies in the requirements gathering of two projects. ResultsOur results show that requirements gathering in virtual reality has an impact on the process of requirements identification. We report advantages and shortcomings that will be of interest to future practitioners. For example, we found that VR sessions for requirements gathering in current VEs could benefit from better pointers and better sound quality. ConclusionCurrent VEs are useful for the requirements gathering task in the development of VR simulators and VR training environments.

Impact of avatar facial anthropomorphism on body ownership, attractiveness and social presence in collaborative tasks in immersive virtual environments

Effective collaboration in immersive virtual environments requires to be able to communicate flawlessly using both verbal and non-verbal communication. We present two experiments investigating the impact of facial anthropomorphism on the sense of body ownership, avatar attractiveness, social presence and performance in two collaborative tasks. In the first experiment participants have to solve a construction game according to their partner’s instructions using three avatars presenting different facial properties. Results reveal no significant difference in terms of body ownership and social presence, but demonstrate significant differences in terms of attractiveness and completion duration of the collaborative task. Unexpectedly, correlation analyses also reveal a link between attractiveness and performance. The more attractive the avatar, the shorter the completion duration of the game. Our second experiment was designed to investigate further the potential impact of the task carried out on the sense of social presence using the same avatars. While we observed a very high sense of social presence in both tasks (asymmetric collaboration and negotiation) with every avatar, our results did not reveal significant difference between the three conditions. However, we observed statistically significant differences between the two task types. The scores of the co-presence and of the perceived message understanding dimensions of social presence were higher during the negotiation task. The sense of social presence appears to be task sensitive, especially when non-verbal communication becomes more important during face-to-face interaction in immersive collaborative virtual environments.

Human factors evaluation in VR-based shunting training

Shunting of trains is a task that requires meticulous adherence to all steps to guarantee safety for everyone involved during and after the procedure. These steps are currently taught using classical teaching materials, such as printouts, videos and training by experienced supervisors. However, due to limited availability of locomotives, hours for training and manpower, training of shunting operation becomes challenging in real life. In this paper, we implemented a lifelike, collaborative virtual environment for shunting training including a novel human factors evaluation system for fatigue and stress monitoring. An experiment with 12 subjects and 3 trainers has been designed and carried out to validate the usage of VR-based shunting training. Positive feedback toward the VR-based training was obtained from the subjects and trainers.

A collaborative virtual reality environment for liver surgery planning

Surgical planning software is a key component in the treatment of tumor diseases. However, desktop-based systems provide only limited visualization and interaction opportunities. Moreover, collaborative planning among members of a surgical team is only possible to a limited extent. In this work, a collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment to assist liver surgeons in tumor surgery planning is presented. Our aim is to improve virtual resection planning between surgeons in a remote or co-located environment. The system allows surgeons to define and adjust virtual resections on patient-specific organ 3D surfaces and 2D image slices. Changes on both modalities are synchronized, which will enable surgeons to iterate and refine the resection surfaces quickly. In addition, a real-time risk map visualization is presented that displays safety margins around tumors. An evaluation performed by liver surgeons provides information on potential benefits, such as the possibility to visualize complex cases and assessing the safety-critical areas, applicability, and limitations for further improvement.

MAPPING COASTAL AND WETLAND VEGETATION COMMUNITIES USING MULTI-TEMPORAL SENTINEL-2 DATA

Abstract. Operational monitoring of complex vegetation communities, such as the ones growing in coastal and wetland areas, can be effectively supported by satellite remote sensing, providing quantitative spatialized information on vegetation parameters, as well as on their temporal evolution. With this work, we explored and evaluated the potential of Sentinel-2 data for assessing the status and evolution of coastal vegetation as the primary indicator of ecosystem conditions, by mapping the different plant communities of Venice lagoon (Northeast Italy) via a rule-based classification approach exploiting synoptic seasonal features of spectral indices and multispectral reflectance. The results demonstrated that coastal and wetland vegetation community type maps derived for two different years scored a good overall accuracy around 80%, with some misclassification in the coastal areas and overestimation of salt marsh communities coverage, and that virtual collaborative environments can facilitate the use of Sentinel-2 data and products to multidisciplinary users.

TOWARDS FREE-VIEWPOINT VIDEO CAPTURE IN CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTS FOR COLLABORATIVE &amp; IMMERSIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract. The ability to capture and explore complex real-world dynamic scenes is crucial for their detailed analysis. Tools which allow retrospective exploration of such scenes may support training of new employees or be used to evaluate industrial processes. In our work, we share insights and practical details for end-to-end acquisition of Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVV) in challenging environments and their potential for exploration in collaborative immersive virtual environments. Our lightweight capturing approach makes use of commodity DSLR cameras and focuses on improving both density and accuracy of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) reconstructions from small sets of images under difficult conditions. The integration of captured 3D models over time into a compact representation allows for efficient visualization of detailed FVVs in an immersive multi-user virtual reality system. We demonstrate our workflow on a representative acquisition of a suction excavation process and outline a use-case for exploration and interaction between collocated users and the FVV in a collaborative virtual environment.

Journalism as Usual? Managing Disruption in Virtual Newsrooms during the COVID-19 Crisis

This study focuses on managerial responses to disruption and, specifically, how news executives implemented journalistic practices and processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the lens of Harvey’s (2006) theorization of space, the concept of Collaborative Virtual Environments, and the model of communities of practice, I explore management’s roles in virtual newsrooms. The method is based on semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 17 news managers in Spain. The findings presented here underline managerial performance in virtual newsrooms considered as communities of practice. Virtual spaces reconfigured relationships among colleagues and increased collaboration, shaping news practices and communication protocols. Management implemented strategies to control the negotiation of meaning, the building of trust and cooperation, and the power dynamics within their professional communities. Journalistic production during the COVID-19 pandemic also raised problematic issues such as work overload, psychological distress, and job insecurity.

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.