TeamPortal: Exploring Virtual Reality Collaboration Through Shared and Manipulating Parallel Views

TL;DR

TeamPortal introduces a manipulable shared-view window that lets collaborators access and act within a partner's FOV to facilitate object transfer in VR. Two user studies show that interactive shared perspectives (TeamPortal) markedly improve performance and social presence in complex tasks, while simpler tasks see limited gains. To address real-time workload and motion concerns, three variants (TeamPortal+, SnapTeamPortal+, DropTeamPortal+) explore pausing and synchronization trade-offs, with SnapTeamPortal+ reducing co-presence and Drops maintaining co-presence while increasing cognitive load. Across studies, the work yields design implications for multi-view VR collaboration, emphasizing task-dependent deployment, modality choices, and scalability considerations. This work advances understanding of how interactive parallel views can enhance coordination and efficiency in collaborative VR systems with practical implications for future CVE designs.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) offers a unique collaborative experience, with parallel views playing a pivotal role in Collaborative Virtual Environments by supporting the transfer and delivery of items. Sharing and manipulating partners' views provides users with a broader perspective that helps them identify the targets and partner actions. We proposed TeamPortal accordingly and conducted two user studies with 72 participants (36 pairs) to investigate the potential benefits of interactive, shared perspectives in VR collaboration. Our first study compared ShaView and TeamPortal against a baseline in a collaborative task that encompassed a series of searching and manipulation tasks. The results show that TeamPortal significantly reduced movement and increased collaborative efficiency and social presence in complex tasks. Following the results, the second study evaluated three variants: TeamPortal+, SnapTeamPortal+, and DropTeamPortal+. The results show that both SnapTeamPortal+ and DropTeamPortal+ improved task efficiency and willingness to further adopt these technologies, though SnapTeamPortal+ reduced co-presence. Based on the findings, we proposed three design implications to inform the development of future VR collaboration systems.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: The overview of collaborative environments: Figures $1)a$ and $2)a$ present top views of simple and complex tasks, respectively; Figures $1)b$ and $2)b$ offer first-person perspectives within the collaborative environment for these tasks.
• Figure 2: Task completion rate and accuracy of (1) simple task and (2) complex task ($P<.05$(*), $P<.01$(**), $P<.001$(***)).
• Figure 3: The accumulated movement distances and the number of times the participants used the Teleport function of (1) simple task and (2) complex task ($P<.05$(*), $P<.01$(**), $P<.001$(***)).
• Figure 4: Box plots of subjective questionnaires for User Study 1. The four subscales of (e) are (1) Attentional allocation; (2) Co-presence; (3) Perceived behavioral interdependence and (4) Perceived message understanding ($P<.05$(*), $P<.01$(**), $P<.001$(***)).
• Figure 5: Illustration of the TeamPortal variants; (1) TeamPortal+; (2) SnapTeamPortal+; and (3) DropTeamPortal+.