Enhancing Collaborative Manipulation Through the Use of Feedback and Awareness in CVEs

Abstract

In the research community, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) developers usually refer to the terms awareness and feedback as something necessary to maintain a fluent collaboration when highly interactive task have to be performed. However, it is remarkable that few studies address the effect that including special kind of awareness has on the task performance and the user experience.This paper proposes how to face the implementation of awareness in order to be taken into account early in the development of a CVE. In addition, it is also described an experiment that was carried out to evaluate the effect of providing some visual cues, showing that users tend to make more mistakes when they are not provided.

Take-over control paradigms in collaborative virtual environments for training

“…The experiment has shown that indeed the smooth type was preferred on this example, but this conclusion can not be generalized. It would be necessary to compare several smooth and sudden functions on different use-cases, adapted to the Take-Over Control and known in the literature [8,3].…”

“…Explicit representations of a user contribution to the interaction has been also studied. García et al [3] proposed a visual feedback consisting of a vector showing where an actor is trying to move a virtual beam.…”

From 3d bimanual toward distant collaborative interaction techniques: an awareness issue

“…In this context, they allow remote users to perceive interactive tools and actions of other users [39]. In the same way, it enhances coordination, especially in co-manipulation tasks through visual [24], auditory and haptic/tactile [37] cues. Experiments proved that these awareness techniques improve task performances in collaborative settings too.…”

“…A survey about similarities between awareness in CSCW and social sciences can be found in [27]. We rather present a specific classification of awareness for CVE taken from [24] and [40]. Thereby, awareness in CVE can be split into 6 classes: This need of informations must be well-studied for each application and must not disturb the use of the system.…”

Knowledge Management for Plant Shutdown in Collaborative Virtual Reality

“…CVREs can be accessed through the Internet and allows a group of geographically separated users to interact in real time. Collaboration and Knowledge Management in Virtual Reality is subject of active and continuing research [12,13,14].…”