Investigation of Interactive Strategies Used in Undertaking Collaborative Tasks

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) present ways for human users to work together on a task. Research efforts of CVEs have mainly focused on the factors that affect the task performance of the users, such as awareness, communication, and presence. Furthermore, the users involved normally have the same task experience or knowledge background. In this paper, we examined the effect of interactive strategies for human/human interaction, which involves human users with different levels of expertise. Within a CVE for an expert and a novice, we deployed three interactive strategies—Tele-Operation, Tele-Assistance3, and Tele-Assistance7—to give the three degrees of autonomy to the novice. Focusing on the performance of the novice, our findings revealed that each interactive strategy has a different effect on the task performance of the novice. These findings could aid in choosing an optimal interactive strategy for performing a collaborative task between an expert and a novice.