Investigating the Influence of Communication and Input Devices on Collaboration in Virtual Environments

As collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are becoming more popular for both entertainment and professional activities, it is important to know which factors influence the collaboration between participants. This paper investigates two aspects of interaction in the context of collaboration between two users. A puzzlesolving task in a basic interactive virtual environment was used as a case study. The influence of voice communication was assessed in a user experiment. Furthermore, as different I/O devices can be used with this kind of applications, the fact whether both participants are using the same device or not, was also checked. From this study, we can conclude that the inclusion of voice communication is important when working on the same task in a CVE, since this allows the participants to explicitly divide the work. On the other hand, the usage of the same kind of device by both users does not significantly influence the collaboration. The availability of different devices shows not to be a problem for the acceptance of CVEs, and therefore it is not necessary to impose a certain device, which is obviously preferable, especially when dealing with home users.