A Study of Influential Factors on Effective Closely-Coupled Collaboration based on Single User Perceptions

The need for collaboration and cooperation across a distance is becoming equal to that between a co-located team. This means that cooperative working must be supported by systems that allow natural social human communication and interaction. A goal of telecollaboration is to reproduce the effectiveness of co-located teamwork across a distributed team. Although many of today’s systems support collaboration, only a subset can be said to support cooperation and no established solution comes close to reproducing the flexibility and efficiency of a face-to-face meeting. Previous work has demonstrated that accessing collaborative virtual environments through CAVE-like display systems provide a natural way of sharing space and objects within it that bring us closer to replicating a face-to-face meeting. Our previous research has demonstrated a link between level of immersion, task performance and feelings of collaboration and cooperation. It was, however, unclear if the advantage came from more natural interaction with objects or more natural interaction with others through objects. The aim of this paper is to understand the impact of using a CAVE-like display has on user-to-object interaction so that we can isolate this from previous results to find the advantage given to collaboration. Task performance was measured and a questionnaire was used to identify the perceived impact of various display factors .The results from this study indicate that the major impact of immersion is on cooperative tasks. Results showed further a disparity between perceived and actual performance, which is discussed.