Toward an enhanced mutual awareness in asymmetric CVE

Abstract

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) aim at providing several users with a consistent shared virtual world. In this work, we focus on the lack of mutual awareness that may appear in many situations and we evaluate different ways to present the distant user and his actions in the Virtual Environment (VE) in order to understand his perception and cognitive process. Indeed, an efficient collaboration involves not only the good perception of some objects but their meaning too. This second criterion introduces the concept of distant analysis that could be a great help in improving the understanding of distant activities. For this work, we focus on a common case consisting in estimating accurately the time at which a distant user analyzed the meaning of a remotely pointed object. Thus, we conduct some experiments to evaluate the concept and compare different techniques for implementing this new awareness feature in a CVE. Amongst others, results show that expertise of the users influences on how they estimate the distant activity and the type of applied strategies.

User Experience in Collaborative Extended Reality: Overview Study

“…Explicit representations of field of view or grasping range are examples of how to communicate users' interaction abilities to others [39]. In asymmetric collaborative virtual environments, there also is a potential desynchronisation problem in coordinating activities between users in real time with different settings and viewpoints, which requires a mutual awareness to be established [31]. Piumsomboon et al proposed and evaluated the effects of sharing awareness cues (field of view frustum, eye-gaze ray, head-gaze ray) on user performance in a collaborative MR system [81].…”