Investigating the Influence of Playback Interactivity during Guided Tours for Asynchronous Collaboration in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper investigates how playback interactivity during VR-guided tours affects asynchronous collaboration in additive manufacturing inspections. It introduces a guided tour playback design with four interaction modes—Passive, Rails, Navigation, and Interactive—enabling observer mimicry of the guide’s actions through multiscale navigation and perspective-sharing cues. A between-subject study with 40 participants shows that independent viewpoint control improves user experience, while added interactivity enhances auditory and spatial recall, albeit with some sickness and workload trade-offs for certain users. The findings support incorporating interactive playback to sustain engagement and improve information retention in CVEs, with implications for broader VR collaboration beyond manufacturing. The work contributes a concrete interaction taxonomy for guided tours, quantitative recall assessments, and qualitative feedback to inform future asynchronous VR collaboration tools.

Abstract

Collaborative virtual environments allow workers to contribute to team projects across space and time. While much research has closely examined the problem of working in different spaces at the same time, few have investigated the best practices for collaborating in those spaces at different times aside from textual and auditory annotations. We designed a system that allows experts to record a tour inside a virtual inspection space, preserving knowledge and providing later observers with insights through a 3D playback of the expert's inspection. We also created several interactions to ensure that observers are tracking the tour and remaining engaged. We conducted a user study to evaluate the influence of these interactions on an observing user's information recall and user experience. Findings indicate that independent viewpoint control during a tour enhances the user experience compared to fully passive playback and that additional interactivity can improve auditory and spatial recall of key information conveyed during the tour.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Exocentric views of the VEs used in the experiment. A: Setup VE showing the participant's avatar in its empty skybox. B: Training VE showing the props used to teach all playback interactions for the Interactive condition. C: Inspection VE showing the participant's avatar observing the guide's avatar and the 3D-printed object. D: Test VE showing the player avatar performing a spatial marking task using the 'marking wand'.
• Figure 2: Bar charts of questionnaire scores. Significantly different pairs are marked with * when $\emph{p} \le 0.05$ and ** when $\emph{p} \le 0.01$. Bar chart whiskers are the $\pm S.E.$ spread of the data. (a): Mean SSQ scores from pre- and post-study. (b): Mean UES scores. (c): Mean NASA-TLX scores. (d): Mean condition ratings.
• Figure 3: Bar charts of collected test responses for verbal and spatial questions from Table \ref{['tbl:tests']}. (a): Verbal scores. (b): Distances of participant-reported defect location from the actual defect location.