Just Undo It: Exploring Undo Mechanics in Multi-User Virtual Reality
Julian Rasch, Florian Perzl, Yannick Weiss, Florian Müller
TL;DR
The paper addresses the absence of undo mechanisms in multi-user VR by evaluating three undo techniques (IndividualUndo, SelectiveUndo, WorldUndo) plus NoUndo across Divided and Collaborative collaboration modes. Using a controlled tower-building task with 32 participants, the study analyzes subjective experience, workload, and objective performance, revealing that WorldUndo increases social connectedness but can cause mutual disturbance, while SelectiveUndo often underperforms. IndividualUndo and WorldUndo generally improve perceived success, recoverability, enjoyment, and future usage intentions, though actual task performance benefits vary by collaboration mode. The findings offer design guidelines for VR undo, emphasizing mode- and task-dependent tradeoffs between social connectedness and interference, and highlight the need for context-aware undo strategies in future VR applications.
Abstract
With the proliferation of VR and a metaverse on the horizon, many multi-user activities are migrating to the VR world, calling for effective collaboration support. As one key feature, traditional collaborative systems provide users with undo mechanics to reverse errors and other unwanted changes. While undo has been extensively researched in this domain and is now considered industry standard, it is strikingly absent for VR systems in research and industry. This work addresses this research gap by exploring different undo techniques for basic object manipulation in different collaboration modes in VR. We conducted a study involving 32 participants organized in teams of two. Here, we studied users' performance and preferences in a tower stacking task, varying the available undo techniques and their mode of collaboration. The results suggest that users desire and use undo in VR and that the choice of the undo technique impacts users' performance and social connection.