User experience study of concurrent virtual environments with 2D tab and 3D portal UIs

3D virtual environments have long been proposed as a means for collaborative work and communication. Many current implementations usually require that a user has one presence in one virtual world, which has an effect of limiting the possible actions a user has in some areas such as education and business. In this paper, we support a users´ presence in multiple concurrent virtual environments and provide a user interface which makes it easier for them to move from one world to another. We evaluate the work by conducting a user experience study to obtain users´ feedback on our solution. Our current implementation supports four concurrent client server connections. User feedback states that using multiple concurrent connections is visually pleasant, entertaining, fun, easy and fast to use.