S02E10: Collaborative VR
“What do we want?!” “Better multi-user virtual work-spaces!”
“When do we want them?!” “A few months ago!”
Dooley here, writing the podcast’s companion blog post this month.
In this episode, we attempt to tackle the unwieldy and unfortunately timely topic of remote meeting — specifically synchronous collaboration — in VR.
Tune in to first hear what’s been up with us recently. Aki coolly reports on his very slick contribution to last month’s VR Game Jam: An IBM Watson-driven voice recognition app with hand tracking, that prompts you to read poetry aloud and evaluates your accuracy (rather, its confidence in interpreting your words) while also visualizing your voice’s waveform!
Keep an eye out for it on SideQuest in the not-too-distant future.
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Our main topic this month is everything that falls under the umbrella term of ‘collaborative VR’. We’re using it as a catch-all for presentation and meeting applications, multi-user design and prototyping spaces, and even, as some of our chosen literature alludes to, training and education.
As usual, we talk our way around this without reviewing a slew of concrete examples, so you don’t need to know the lay of the land in order to follow the conversation. (Incidentally, if you’re looking for a rundown of commercially available apps, Ben Lang has compiled a great list that corresponds to the categories mentioned above.) Instead, we run through a cross-section of VR literature from 1995 through to 2019, and then discuss their highlights —typically categories or design guidelines — in relation to our gloriously fudged attempt at collaboratively making a custom game in the popular social VR space, Rec Room.
A significant portion of conference and journal papers on the topic deal with the tricky problem of back-end implementation, but we’ve found a few studies and theoretical takes that, like us, attempt to approach it as a general problem with loosely generalisable if not universally applicable principles.
Some teams of authors are interested foremost in the representation of virtual humans in collaborative virtual environments, and go to town listing dimensions along which we might assess those; others take an empirical content analysis or standard usability study approach and provide more sensible sets of (around four) categories by which we might assess not-overly-specialised collaborative virtual environments.
We encourage you to listen in full, but if you’re in a tremendous rush and just want our point of departure and concluding remarks:
– Collaborative VR design considerations can quickly become so use-case specific that it makes little sense to try to cater to a broad range of potential applications if you don’t know precisely what your end user(s) want or need.
– If, for you, ‘collaborative’ signifies group meetings more than two-person attempts at ‘computer-aided design’, then simplicity supporting learnability is paramount. In the latter case, obviously, deep functionality takes precedence, and being able to simultaneously view and modify information or representations becomes even more crucial than in the first instance.
– Thus, taking literally the aphorism that ‘less is more’, my personal recommendation would be to start with a space and some avatars that give you the same basic abilities as real life (body, face, voice, basic gesture) and work upwards; add complexity and ‘superpowers’ from there. Don’t begin by listing all the incredible things that VR could afford (“what if users could literally fly away to a breakout room? What if we let them exchange virtual business cards that automatically send an email…” etc.) and then whittle it down to what can be technically implemented or what would actually be usable (learnable). Remember: We live in a world where even tech-savvy professionals like Silicon Valley programmers occasionally struggle to join Zoom meetings.
So, per the old adage of the U.S. Navy, keep it simple, stupid.
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Papers discussed (chronological order):
Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlén, L. E., Greenhalgh, C., & Snowdon, D. (1995). User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’95, 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223935
Fraser, M., Glover, T., Vaghi, I., Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C., Hindmarsh, J., & Heath, C. (2000). Revealing the realities of collaborative virtual reality. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Collaborative Virtual Environments — CVE ’00, 29–37. https://doi.org/10.1145/351006.351010
Economou, D., Doumanis, I., Argyriou, L., & Georgalas, N. (2017). User experience evaluation of human representation in collaborative virtual environments. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 21(6), 989–1001. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-1075-4
Geszten, D., Komlódi, A., Hercegfi, K., Hámornik, B., Young, A., Köles, M., & Lutters, W. G. (2018). A Content-Analysis Approach for Exploring Usability Problems in a Collaborative Virtual Environment. https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/20915
Pereira, V., Matos, T., Rodrigues, R., Nóbrega, R., & Jacob, J. (2019). Extended Reality Framework for Remote Collaborative Interactions in Virtual Environments. 2019 International Conference on Graphics and Interaction (ICGI), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGI47575.2019.8955025
