Leaving the World Behind: Supporting Group Collaboration Patterns in a Shared Virtual Environment for Product Design

Abstract

Virtual reality technology is increasingly being applied to globally distributed teams engaged in collaborative product design. Observations of product design teams have suggested four distinct patterns of collaboration-complementary, competitive, peer-to-peer, and leader-follower. Another insight from observation is that collaboration consists of fluid transitions between these patterns in the accomplishment of the design task, driven by a flexible process of subgrouping and regrouping which reflects the structure and progress of the task. Yet most collaborative virtual environment systems support only one pattern of collaboration-peer-to-peer-and those that do explicitly support multiple patterns or roles do not allow fluid transitions between them in the context of the same task. In addition, no explicit support is provided to allow subgroups to be formed and dissolved. A collaborative virtual environment that supports multiple collaboration patterns and fluid transitions was developed using the Shared Simple Virtual Environment (SSVE) application framework. A novel user interface widget, the collaboration tree, was created to drive the subgrouping and regrouping process. Group experiments were performed to test the operating hypothesis that support for group collaboration patterns led to higher performance. The result was that the operating hypothesis was confirmed; however, the conceptual approach to problem solving, suggested by the presence of support for collaboration patterns, may have been more significant than the actual mechanism provided.

Mobile Group Dynamics in Large-Scale Collaborative Virtual Environments

“…This is the result of the suite of techniques as a whole. It could be argued that the very presence of MGDs would have given participants an idea of how to work together effectively [13] and, with 66% of the conversation being task related, this was representative of the extra teamwork taking place.…”

“…The people present may divide themselves into subgroups to carry out certain tasks, or someone may talk to the person next to them, using 'sidechannels' of communication [3] rather than addressing the group as a whole. Functionality to support changes to a group's structure have rarely been implemented in CVEs, but a recent exception was [13], who allowed users to form subgroups explicitly using menubased selection.…”

Exploring the Relationship Between Distributed Training, Integrated Learning Environments, and Immersive Training Environments

“…The system has done well in predicting overall team performance through analysis of the (oral) team communication collected. b) Linebarger, Janneck & Kessler (2004). This study focused on groups using virtual reality (not immersed) to perform a design task.…”

Benefits of synchronous collaboration support for an application-centered analysis team working on complex problems

“…Subgroups can be nested to an arbitrary depth. This CORBAbased, multithreaded, peer-to-peer, subgroup-aware collaboration architecture is similar to the one pioneered in [21]. A limitation of this architecture is that all computers must be on the same network or security domain; collaboration transactions cannot currently traverse a firewall.…”

“…In particular, the work by Saul Greenberg and Carl Gutwin at the University of Calgary, as embodied in their GroupKit toolkit, is relevant to this stage; see [12] for a representative example. The second stage, Specialization, is thoroughly discussed in [21], as is the support for fluid creation and dissolution of collaborative subgroups to reflect the hierarchical structure of the task. The third stage, Synchronization, draws on the concept of WYSIWIS ("What You See Is What I See"), which can be found in [11] and [34].…”