COllaborative Virtual ENvironments: Experiments on Small Group Behaviour in the COVEN Project

This paper describes work being undertaken by the multi-partner European Union funded project COVEN (COllaborative Virtual ENvironments). COVEN is developing collaborative virtual environment (CVE) systems and technologies in order to support a group of travel rehearsal applications. One of the major themes of the project is the evaluation of CVE applications through extensive network trials, usability evaluations and in depth case-controlled experiments. This paper concentrates upon an experimental study where groups of three strangers meet in a CVE to carry out a simple collaborative task. The experiment was designed to investigate issues about group behaviour such as the relationship between emergent leadership and computational resources, presence of being in a place, and the co-presence, the sense of togetherness, amongst the participants. This experiment and others undertaken by the project highlight a number of issues to do with participant representation, interaction style and system implementation that need to be addressed in future CVE development.