Collaborative Virtual Environments Research Articles

Presence and Team Performance in Synchronous Collaborative Virtual Environments

Synchronous collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow distributed teams to interact and work. CVEs afford a sense of presence, or “being there” in the workspace, as well as the opportunity to “do there” via interactions within the environment. However, there has been limited empirical evidence to support the link of presence and team performance, especially for CVE work. We identified multiple dimensions of presence that reflect relationships known to be essential to collaborative work and conducted a CVE experiment with 80 teams. Our results suggest certain aspects of presence are more important than others in driving virtual team performance.

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus: dyadic collaboration in the metaverse

PurposeThe gender composition of teams remains an important yet complex element in unlocking the success of collaboration and performance in the metaverse. In this study, the authors examined the collaborations of same- and mixed-gender dyads to investigate how gender composition influences perceptions of the dyadic collaboration process and outcomes at both the individual and team levels in the metaverse.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on expectation states theory and social role theory, the authors hypothesized differences between dyads of different gender compositions. A blocked design was utilized where 432 subjects were randomly assigned to teams of different gender compositions: 101 male dyads, 59 female dyads and 56 mixed-gender dyads. Survey responses were collected after the experiment.FindingsMultilevel multigroup analyses reveal that at the team level, male dyads took on the we-impress manifestation to increase satisfaction with the team solution. In contrast, female and mixed-gender dyads adopted the we-work-hard-on-task philosophy to increase satisfaction with the team solution. At the individual level, impression management is the key factor associated with trust in same-gender dyads but not in mixed-gender dyads.Originality/valueAs one of the pioneering works on gender effects in the metaverse, our findings shed light on two fronts in virtual dyadic collaborations. First, the authors offer a theoretically grounded and gendered perspective by investigating male, female and mixed-gender dyads in the metaverse. Second, the study advances team-based theory and deepens the understanding of gender effects at both the individual and team levels (multilevel) in a virtual collaboration environment.

The Influence of Immersive and Collaborative Virtual Environments in Improving Spatial Skills

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) is growing in popularity in educational contexts. In this work, we present a novel software application based on immersive VR in which users can interact simultaneously with a model in a shared virtual scene and maintain audiovisual communication. The 3D model-building activity within the application was designed to improve spatial skills. Twenty-nine industrial engineering students completed the modeling activity in groups of two or three. Post-test scores showed significant improvement over pre-test scores for both spatial tests used to measure the effectiveness of the instrument in improving spatial skills. Participants rated the application favorably in terms of usability and functionality. Results suggest that spatial training in a collaborative immersive virtual environment has the potential to be an effective approach to improving spatial skills.

Gamified dances, digital and socio-emotional skills in collaborative virtual environments of university students surviving the Covid-19 virus

The use of virtual dance avatars and virtual learning guides has enabled gamified dance teaching to virtualize the current university. In this experience, the objective was to test four hypotheses about the gamified dance developed in collaborative Zoom environments, and its effects on the digital and socioemotional skills of individuals who were severely or moderately infected by the Covid-19 virus between the years 2020 and 2022. We worked with 119 students and eight teachers from the Professional School of Primary Education of a private university in the city of Lima (Peru). An experimental design with pre and post-test was applied and Likert-type scales were used for data collection. The experience with gamified dances took place over four weeks in a dance competition at the university. The results allow us to assert that gamified dances developed digital skills, emotional skills, as well as socioemotional skills. These skills differ between the experimental group and the control group, with the exception of digital security skills, and the ability to improve self-esteem, which are skills that require more body practice as was achieved in the experimental group (dance virtual), which was also developed in the students of the control group (face-to-face dance).

Shifting Gears in a Pandemic: The Impact of Online Academic Support for International and Domestic Students

During a global pandemic, many students in 2020-2021 turned to peer-facilitated academic support through supplemental instruction (SI) to succeed. In this study, proficient students were hired as SI Leaders and trained to facilitate study sessions in a collaborative virtual learning environment. The impact of online SI support is assessed upon subgroups of 4,831 students enrolled in difficult courses at a four-year public university. Mean course GPAs and pass rates of international students, students of color, and white students with varying levels of SI session attendance were examined. One-way ANOVA and chi-square test results reveal significant differences by level of attendance for students of color and white students, with higher mean course GPAs and pass rates associated with higher levels of attendance at SI sessions for all three subgroups. These results are consistent with feedback from SI attendees and convey the significance of programs like SI, especially in times of crisis.

Remote arts therapy in collaborative virtual environment: A pilot case study

Motivated by the unique experience of creating three-dimensional artworks in virtual reality (VR) and the need for teletherapy due to the global pandemic, we conducted this pilot case study to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of using a custom-designed collaborative virtual environment (CVE) to enable remote arts therapy. Three participants (two females and one male) experiencing moderate to high stress as measured by the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) joined this study. Each participant had eight 45-minute one-on-one sessions with the therapist for eight consecutive weeks. These eight sessions covered eight art creation themes and were delivered following pre-designed protocols. The CVE was the only medium to facilitate the sessions, during which the therapist and the participants were physically separated into two rooms. The quantitative and qualitative results suggested that the CVE-enabled approach was generally feasible and was welcomed by both the participants and the therapist. However, more evidence of the approach’s effectiveness in enhancing the participants’ mental wellbeing is needed because the results of the pilot case study were affected by the pandemic. The advantages and disadvantages of this approach and the CVE were investigated from practicality and technological affordance perspectives. Potential improvements to the CVE are also proposed to better facilitate the practice of remote arts therapy in CVE. We encourage future studies to cautiously investigate CVE-enabled remote arts therapy in clinical settings and collect more evidence regarding its effectiveness in addressing clinically diagnosed mental disorders and other complications.

Comparing Student Performance in Emergency Remote and Face-to-Face Collaborative Learning Courses.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented shift from face-to-face (F2F) instruction to emergency remote teaching (ERT) for over one billion learners worldwide. Studies from K-12 and higher education have begun to address the impact of ERT on student learning and well-being. The lessons learned from ERT will likely shape the response to future public health emergencies and inform the design and implementation of remote courses. As such, it will be important to identify teaching practices in ERT that promoted student engagement and learning. Here, we address whether undergraduate collaborative learning courses were able to support student content knowledge outcomes at similar levels in ERT as compared to F2F classroom environments. Specifically, we tracked student performance in three different team-based undergraduate neuroscience courses. These courses were all taught by the same instructor during the academic years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. Importantly, we found that student scores on individual and team assessments as well as measures of course satisfaction were similar between ERT and F2F. Taken together, our data suggest that the virtual collaborative learning environment in these courses was not associated with a decrease in student or team performance when compared to a traditional F2F classroom.

(How) Can Machine Learning Support Teaching Staff in a Virtual Collaborative Learning Environment?

Purpose: Supervising roles within virtual collaborative learning (VCL) environments face many different challenges and are often having difficulties keeping an eye on everything and comprehending every participant’s or group’s workflow. To help supervisors with problems like that we developed a software prototype to support their daily workflow and overcome the mentioned challenges. Study design/methodology/approach: This study used a design science research approach to investigate how learning analytics might be able to support teaching staff in VCL settings. Previous studies demonstrated that this approach is very well suited to derive design guidelines for such software artifacts. Initially, a qualitative interview series with four experienced tutors was carried out to get an in-depth understanding of the challenges and tasks teaching staff typically faces in VCL environments. The interview material was systematically analysed to acquire the underlying software requirements. These were then combined with existing knowledge about support software of similar use cases to create a first prototype, primarily based on a supervised machine learning model that classifies online messages sent within the teams. Findings: The software tool we have developed has shown that machine learning processes can indeed be used to support teaching staff in VCL environments. The tool achieves satisfactory classification performance in categorizing chat messages. It could therefore be demonstrated that it is possible to classify chat messages using a software tool. The interviews conducted revealed a particular interest in the statistical evaluations of group activities in Microsoft Teams. This was said to save a lot of time in the subsequent evaluation of the groups. The interviewed eTutors also expressed an interest in receiving private information on the development of possible conflicts within groups. The interest of the interviewed supervisors was very high and additional interviews could lead to further possible feature ideas. In general, the evaluative interviews resulted in positive feedback regarding how our prototype supported eTutors during their work. Originality/value: In current times, spatially distributed and asynchronous education plays a bigger role than ever before. VCL environments are useful tools to overcome these challenges of time and space. However, unlike research on conversational agents or automated feedback systems, the focus of this work is not on the communication interface between software and users or the exclusively quantitative analysis of messages. The goal is to evaluate the content of sent messages within VCL environments using the six defined categories to gain a better qualitative understanding of the teams’ collaboration and its workflow.

Semi-Supervised Behavior Labeling Using Multimodal Data during Virtual Teamwork-Based Collaborative Activities

Adaptive human-computer systems require the recognition of human behavior states to provide real-time feedback to scaffold skill learning. These systems are being researched extensively for intervention and training in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Autistic individuals are prone to social communication and behavioral differences that contribute to their high rate of unemployment. Teamwork training, which is beneficial for all people, can be a pivotal step in securing employment for these individuals. To broaden the reach of the training, virtual reality is a good option. However, adaptive virtual reality systems require real-time detection of behavior. Manual labeling of data is time-consuming and resource-intensive, making automated data annotation essential. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised machine learning method to supplement manual data labeling of multimodal data in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) used to train teamwork skills. With as little as 2.5% of the data manually labeled, the proposed semi-supervised learning model predicted labels for the remaining unlabeled data with an average accuracy of 81.3%, validating the use of semi-supervised learning to predict human behavior.

Investigating the effect of network latency on users’ performance in Collaborative Virtual Environments using navigation aids

Serious games play a pivotal role in engaging users in activities which are considered less-engaging but healthy. Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), one of the enablers of serious games are used in various fields including education, healthcare, tele-conferencing and assembly tasks. There are different factors that affect user performance in CVE. These factors include network latency, loose coordination, lack of task distributions strategy and lack of awareness. As compared to other factors,network latency has unfortunately got less attention of the researcher and therefore, it sometimes becomes a bottleneck for the user performance in CVE. In this paper, we analyzed the effect of network latency on user performance in CVE with textual, audio, 3D Map-Liner (3DML) and arrows-casting aids on different participants. Based on task distribution model, a simulated environment for collaborative assembly task was developed to conduct the experiments. The experiments were performed on users with textual, audio, 3DML and arrows-casting aids with five level of latency (i.e. 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200 ms) to evaluate 19 groups(two participants per group) to check their performance in terms of network latency. Overall, results showed that the user’s performance was better in arrows-casting based navigation as compared to other navigation aids (i.e textual, audio and 3DML) using five level of latency (i.e 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200 ms). Whenever the value of latency was increased the task completion time increased significantly with slight decrease in errors rate.

A collaborative, immersive, virtual reality environment for training electricians

This paper presents the development of a multi-user, collaborative virtual reality environment for training electricians to work on the electric power distribution network. Typically, traditional trainings in this field have lots of constraints and don’t allow learners to experience a wide set of different equipment that is installed in the network nor bad weather conditions and the different risk analysis that should be performed. With the proposed virtual reality environment, learners will be able to practice several realistic conditions without risking themselves.

How Can One Share a User’s Activity during VR Synchronous Augmentative Cooperation?

Collaborative virtual environments allow people to work together while being distant. At the same time, empathic computing aims to create a deeper shared understanding between people. In this paper, we investigate how to improve the perception of distant collaborative activities in a virtual environment by sharing users’ activity. We first propose several visualization techniques for sharing the activity of multiple users. We selected one of these techniques for a pilot study and evaluated its benefits in a controlled experiment using a virtual reality adaptation of the NASA MATB-II (Multi-Attribute Task Battery). Results show (1) that instantaneous indicators of users’ activity are preferred to indicators that continuously display the progress of a task, and (2) that participants are more confident in their ability to detect users needing help when using activity indicators.

NETWORK LATENCY EFFECT ON USER PERFORMANCE IN COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT USING TASK DISTRIBUTION MODEL


 
 
 Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are used for training, education, tele- conferencing and assembly of synthetic objects. Network latency, loose coordination, no task distribution strategy and less awareness are the main factors that affect user performance in CVEs. The effect of network latency on user performance in CVE was analyzed. Visual and audio feedback was used for communication between the collaborators. Based on task distribution model, a simulated environment for collaborative assembly task was developed to conduct the experiments. The experiments were performed on different college students comprising of 20 virtual teams of 40 individuals using the latency from 0 to 5000 msec in LAN. The result showed that the user‟s performance was better in dynamic with audio with no latency, but whenever the lag was increased the task completion time increased than dynamic with textual based. At 1000 msec latency, the dynamic with audio and textual modality values were almost the same. Above 1000 msec of latency, the user performance in dynamic with textual was better as compared to dynamic with audio.
 
 

Inclusive LGBTQIA+ healthcare: An interprofessional case-based experience for cultural competency awareness.

Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA+) patients report experiences of discrimination within healthcare settings due to a lack of provider knowledge and biases of healthcare workers. There is an identified need among all health professions to provide more culturally competent healthcare for this community. Early interventions during healthcare profession training programs may be effective to address this need. The overall goal of this study was to assess the educational impact of an active learning session that was specifically designed to enhance LGBTQIA+ cultural competency awareness using an interprofessional setting. This 2-year study involved students from 16 healthcare professional programs joining virtually to form interprofessional teams. A small group case-based learning approach was used and included pre/post-activity surveys to measure the change in student attitude and confidence, as well as the change in perception of the importance of the activity. Results indicate an increase in perception of importance (p < 0.005) and in overall level of confidence (p < 0.001) with respect to LGBTQIA+ issues post-session. Key themes established through the session represent an overall recognition of the importance of interprofessional education and awareness of LGBTQIA+ healthcare needs. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of a case-based approach for enhancing cultural competency awareness across different healthcare professions programs. This session also provided an interprofessional learning environment to allow multiple healthcare professions program students to interact and share perspectives. The positive impact of this intervention in a highly collaborative virtual learning environment also highlights that this immersive active learning approach that can be adopted across different programs and institutions.

Toward Large-Scale Test for Certifying Autonomous Driving Software in Collaborative Virtual Environment

Toward Large-Scale Test for Certifying Autonomous Driving Software in Collaborative Virtual Environment

Contextualizing Team Adaptation for Fostering Creative Outcomes in Multicultural Virtual Teams: A Mixed Methods Approach

Rapid developments in real-time collaborative technologies, coupled with the quest for innovation and creativity, have made global virtual teams (GVTs) a viable workplace collaboration option that many companies are turning to. Although diverse team member perspectives in GVTs are expected to foster creativity, cultural diversity within GVTs also poses significant challenges related to knowledge exchange and integration among team members. Grounding our work in the team adaptation and cultural intelligence (CQ) literatures, we suggest CQ as a plausible modality for cultural adaptation in GVTs. Specifically, we propose a nomological network comprising CQ dimensions (motivation, cognition, metacognition, and behavior) serving as a cultural adaptation mechanism for fostering creativity in GVT outcomes. We contextualize and extend CQ theory, which has previously focused on face-to-face contexts, to the virtual collaborative GVT environment. For this, we conceptualize the significant role of deep-level implicitly negotiated adaptative behavior (role structure adaptation) in GVTs—in addition to surface-level explicitly displayed adaptative behavior (CQ behavior). We tested the proposed model through a sequential mixed methods approach that integrated the results from a quantitative two-wave survey study with findings from a qualitative study comprising expert interviews, to arrive at rich and robust inferences and metainferences. The proposed CQ-for-GVT framework, along with delineated boundary conditions and associated propositions, explicates an integrative model explaining the role of CQ for GVT creativity performance. The delineated model not only has theoretical implications but also provides useful directions for GVT practitioners.

Virtual Teamwork in Gamified 3D Environment

Virtual teamwork has spread strongly in various fields in recent times. COVID lockdown measures radically boosted the use of distance-independent remote collaboration methods. Although there are many modern virtual 3D spaces available for teamwork today, they lack additional motivational factors other than the visual 3d experience. Based on this, we tried to research the possible benefits of using gamification technics in 3D virtual collaboration environments to increase virtual team members' motivation. This article attempts to explore and highlight the possibilities of this area, and propose a model framework for implementation of gamified elements in 3D virtual teamwork environments.

Formative Design and Development of a Three-Dimensional Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment Through Learning Experience Design Methods

Formative Design and Development of a Three-Dimensional Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment Through Learning Experience Design Methods

Design and implementation of a metaverse platform for traditional culture: the chime bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng

Metaverse platforms have become increasingly prevalent for collaboration in virtual environments. Metaverse platforms, as opposed to virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, expand with enhanced social meanings within virtual worlds. The research object in this study is the chime bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng, one of China's most treasured cultural heritage sites. We aimed to create a metaverse platform for the chime bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng to provide visitors with a highly immersive and interactive experience. First, we collected the materials and data of the chime bells and other exhibits, as well as historical information. Then, the data were processed and integrated for 3D model reconstruction. In addition, we designed the virtual roaming system through which visitors could interact with the exhibits to obtain multimedia information and even knock to ring the chime bells. Finally, we built our system to connect multiple visitors in different geographic locations and encourage them to collaborate and communicate within the virtual space. This platform helps users visualize cultural heritage, simulates real-life tour experiences with intuitive manners of interaction, and motivates visitors’ interest in traditional culture. This research also reveals the potential use of metaverse-related techniques in cultural heritage sectors.

Cone of Vision as a Behavioural Cue for VR Collaboration

Mutual awareness of visual attention is essential for collaborative work. In the field of collaborative virtual environments (CVE), it has been proposed to use Field-of-View (FoV) frustum visualisations as a cue to support mutual awareness during collaboration. Recent studies on FoV frustum visualisations focus on asymmetric collaboration with AR/VR hardware setups and 3D reconstructed environments. In contrast, we focus on the general-purpose CVEs (i.e., VR shared offices), whose popularity is increasing due to the availability of low-cost headsets, and the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. In these CVEs collaboration roles are symmetrical, and the same 2D content available on desktop computers is displayed on 2D surfaces in a 3D space (VR screens). We prototyped one such CVE to evaluate FoV frustrum visualisation within this collaboration scenario. We also implement a FoV visualisation generated from an average fixation map (AFM), therefore directly generated by users' gaze behaviour which we call Cone of Vision (CoV). Our approach to displaying the frustum visualisations is tailored for 2D surfaces in 3D space and allows for self-awareness of this visual cue. We evaluate CoV in the context of a general exploratory data analysis (EDA) with 10 pairs of participants. Our findings indicate that CoV is beneficial during shifts between independent and collaborative work and supports collaborative progression across the visualisation. Self-perception of the CoV improves visual attention coupling, reduces the number of times users watch the collaborator's avatars and offers a consistent representation of the shared reality.