Collaboration in Virtual Reality: Survey and Perspectives

TL;DR

A survey of the literature is included, that identifies and explains the features introduced and the challenges involved with the VREs, and furthermore provides various interesting future research directions.

Abstract

The application of Virtual Reality Environments (VRE) has been gaining momentum as a relatively new tool to assist with mitigating various difficulties including abstractness of concepts, lack of user engagement, perception of disconnection from other users. A VRE may offer both synchronous and asynchronous experiences, in addition to an immersive environment which promotes users' engagement. Past research has shown that, in general, VRE do improve the experiences they try to enhance in many aspects of human activity. Terms like immersiveness and 3D representation of real life objects and environments are, as it appears, the two most obvious positive effects of Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, despite these benefits it does not come without challenges. The main three concepts/challenges are the spatial design, the collaboration interaction between its members and the VRE, and the audio and video fidelity. Each of the three includes a number of other components that should be addressed for the total experience to be fine-tuned. These include mutual embodiment and shared perspectives, teleportation, gestural interaction, symmetric and asymmetric collaboration, physical and virtual co-location, inventory, and time and spatial synchronization. This paper comprises a survey of the literature, that identifies and explains the features introduced and the challenges involved with the VREs, and furthermore provides various interesting future research directions.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Styles of virtual hands Schwind2017-vq
• Figure 2: The Jumping technique for teleportation: "Our two-user jumping technique for remote collaboration allows the navigator (blue) to adjust the translational offset of the passenger (red) when planning a jump."weissker2020getting
• Figure 3: Interaction gestures for distant manipulations with one hand. grandi2019characterizing
• Figure 4: Bimanual transformations grandi2019characterizing.
• Figure 5: "Manipulating Parallel Containers. a) Parallel Containers, b) Switching parallel version, c) Highlighting all the versions, d) Hiding all the versions except the chosen one, e) Merging a parallel version into the chosen one" xia2018spacetime.