Measuring the collaboration degree in immersive 3D collaborative virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) are usually evaluated according to the following aspects: cohesion between team members, implicit communication, and task performance. The degree of user awareness is another important aspect that deserves attention, especially when the CVE is 3D and immersive. 3DCVEs have the main goal of attaining a high degree of teamwork by exposing the team members to a suitable level of immersion that normally involves the stimulus of more than one sense, normally vision, hearing and touch. In this work, we present and discuss a new approach to measure the collaboration degree in immersive 3DCVEs. User awareness is measured by monitoring the use of the interaction and visualization schemes provided by the VE from different points of view, such as self awareness in a collaborative team, awareness of the other, and awareness of the work group. We conducted a case study where two users simultaneously immersed in the same VE were invited to walk together, assuming different roles. One user was invited to guide his colleague and, afterwards, the roles were swapped to guarantee equal participation, individual responsibility and positive interdependence, which are all mandatory features in a collaborative task.