Avatar-Model Interaction in Virtual Worlds Improves Distributed Team Collaboration through Issue Discovery

Using virtual reality to facilitate communication in the AEC domain: a systematic review

“…A total of 13 studies were performed by a research team whose topics focused on the collaboration of geographically distributed student teams on performing construction-related works, including 3D and 4D modeling, cost estimating and scheduling processes. To be specific, research objectives for these studies were classified into distributed team collaboration (Iorio et al , 2011; Dossick et al , 2012; Anderson and Dossick, 2014; Anderson et al , 2014; Dossick et al , 2014; Iorio and Taylor, 2014b; Anderson et al , 2017), boundary spanning (Alin et al , 2013; Iorio and Taylor, 2014a; Zelkowicz et al , 2015; Comu et al , 2017) and project network facilitation (Comu et al , 2012; Comu et al , 2014). In these applications, VR environment provided abundant collaborative functionalities, such as text and voice chat features, thought bubbles and team screen, for virtual teams to share their works in real-time.…”

“…Avatar is a digital human in a virtual world operated by a live participant (Eiris and Gheisari, 2017). The availability of an avatar’s gestures and locations provides other users basic cues of the object discussed by the other avatar and increases the social presence, which possibly results in more efficient communication processes (Anderson and Dossick, 2014). Furthermore, this type of non-verbal behaviors, which usually include eye contact, distance, body orientation, movement, facial expression, gestures and selected features of the spatial environment, can encourage social exchanges and improve interaction efficiency in virtual settings (Tepper and Haase, 1978; Salem and Earle, 2000).…”

“…Finger-pointing affordance was enabled by a laser gun modeled as an extension of the avatar, which helped the user to draw specific attention from others on the affected items and enhanced their mutual understanding during the construction process (Shi et al , 2016). Thought bubble was designed in five types in the CyberGRID project as a gestural capability appearing on avatars’ heads, indicating I have a comment, I agree, I disagree, I have a question and I am away (Iorio et al , 2011; Comu et al , 2012; Dossick et al , 2012; Alin et al , 2013; Anderson and Dossick, 2014; Anderson et al , 2014; Comu et al , 2014; Dossick et al , 2014; Iorio and Taylor, 2014b; Iorio and Taylor, 2014a; Zelkowicz et al , 2015; Anderson et al , 2017; Comu et al , 2017). It was straightforward to determine whether a team has reached an agreement by simply looking at thought bubbles on avatars’ heads.…”

“…The expert appraisal was mostly used by a group of researchers, whose topics focused on the collaboration of virtual teams in the virtual world using their developed platform called CyberGRID. Their projects focused on areas such as distributed team collaboration (Iorio et al , 2011; Dossick et al , 2012; Anderson and Dossick, 2014; Anderson et al , 2014; Dossick et al , 2014; Iorio and Taylor, 2014b; Anderson et al , 2017), boundary spanning (Alin et al , 2013; Iorio and Taylor, 2014a; Zelkowicz et al , 2015; Comu et al , 2017) and project network facilitation (Comu et al , 2012; Comu et al , 2014). Although research objectives varied in these papers and not necessarily focused on communication directly, communication was always a metric to further analyze the research objective.…”

“…BIM is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility and includes shared information of the facility throughout its entire life cycle (National Institute of Building Sciences, 2020). From this review, it was found that the integration of BIM and game engines to develop VR environment has become predominant in the last eight years (2011–2018), where BIM was widely used to create 3-D representations of construction jobsites or facilities in virtual environments (Alin et al , 2013; Anderson et al , 2014, 2017; Anderson and Dossick, 2014; Arain and Burkle, 2011; Christiansson et al , 2011; Comu et al , 2012, 2014, 2017; Dossick et al , 2012, 2014; Du et al , 2016, 2018; Eiris and Gheisari, 2018; Iorio et al , 2011; Iorio and Taylor, 2014a, 2014b; Koutsabasis et al , 2011; Kumar et al , 2011; Shen et al , 2012; Shi et al , 2016, 2018; Shiratuddin and Thabet, 2011; Wu and Kaushik, 2015; Yamamoto et al , 2018; Zelkowicz et al , 2015). It is believed the BIM-based game engine can enhance mutual understanding among users in both industrial and educational settings (Du et al , 2016).…”