Evaluation of collaborative construction in mixed reality

Abstract

Collaborative virtual and augmented reality are an active area of research and many systems supporting collaboration have been presented. Just like there are many different systems for VR and AR, there are many different types of collaboration. In some cases, virtual reality is used to enhance an existing collaborative process. In other cases, it enables new types of collaboration that previously were not possible (e.g. distributed VR). Other systems support tasks that can be performed either individually as well as collaboratively. While these tasks may allow to be performed collaboratively, little has been said on what the benefit is in doing so. We present a user study of a collaborative construction task in a shared physical workspace virtual reality environment under various degrees of interaction in collaboration. Our results show that, for this type of task, a pair of subjects concurrently interacting can be significantly more effective, even though individual user performance decreases. Our results further show that there is no significant benefit in giving only verbal and non-verbal assistance over a single user performing the task.