Small-Group Behavior in a Virtual and Real Environment: A Comparative Study

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment that compares behavior in small groups when its members carry out a task in a virtual environment (VE) and then continue the same task in a similar, real-world environment. The purpose of the experiment was not to examine task performance, but to compare various aspects of the social relations among the group members in the two environments. Ten groups of three people each, who had never met before, met first in a shared VE and carried out a task that required the identification and solution of puzzles that were presented on pieces of paper displayed around the walls of a room. The puzzle involved identifying that the same-numbered words across all the pieces of paper formed a riddle or saying. The group continued this task for fifteen minutes, and then stopped to answer a questionnaire. The group then reconvened in the real world and continued the same task. The experiment also required one of the group members to continually monitor a particular one of the others in order to examine whether social discomfort could be generated within a VE. In each group, there was one immersed person with a head-mounted display and head-tracking and two non-immersed people who experienced the environment on a workstation display. The results suggest that the immersed person tended to emerge as the leader in the virtual group, but not in the real meeting. Group accord tended to be higher in the real meeting than in the virtual meeting. Socially conditioned responses such as embarrassment could be generated in the virtual meeting, even though the individuals were presented to one another by very simple avatars. The study also found a positive relationship between presence of being in a place and copresence—the sense of being with the other people. Accord in the group increased with presence, the performance of the group, and the presence of women in the group. The study is seen as part of a much larger planned study, for which this experiment was used to begin to understand the issues involved in comparing real and virtual meetings.

Collaborating in networked immersive spaces: as good as being there together?

“…The main finding of that study that is relevant here is that whereas collaborators in the FtF condition experienced that they participated equally, in the ItD condition they reported that they contributed unequallyFdespite being unaware of what type of system the other participant was using (as was the case in the Slater et al [7] study mentioned above, and in the study we report here).…”

“…The questions, which will in part be reproduced below, were often based on previous studies (esp. [7,11]) in order to build on and extend earlier results.…”

“…Here we need to mention again that our questions about contribution closely followed the questions that have been used in previous studies about 'leadership' [7,9]. The difference in the current study is that we studied pairs of participants, whereas other studies have often involved three participants.…”

“…A previous study by Slater et al [7] of a puzzlesolving task with three participants (one using an immersive head-mounted display system, and two on desktop systems) found that presence and co-presence were correlated, and that leadership varied between a virtual setting in which the more immersed participant was singled out as the leaderFas against the same task performed in the real setting where no one was singled out as the leader. In another recent study [1] which examined presence, co-presence and collaboration and compared a task on two VR systems with different levels of immersion (desktop vs. IPT system), it was found that although participants were able to make discriminating judgements about their own experience (presence and co-presence) of the different VR systems, they were unable to make discriminating judgements about their joint experience (collaboration and communication) in relation to the two different systems (cf.…”

“…By co-presence we mean the subjective sense of being together or being co-located with another person in a computer-generated environment; a definition that has been used in other studies [7,9,11]. In order to find out how co-present the participants felt, using the different systems, we asked two similar questions about how much the participants had a sense of being in the same room as their partner (on a scale of 1-5 where 1= to a very small extent and 5= to a very high extent): ''To what extent did you have a sense of being in the same room as your partner?''…”