Human Interaction in Multi-User Virtual Reality

In this paper we will present an immersive multiuser environment for studying joint action and social interaction. Besides the technical challenges of immersing multiple persons into a single virtual environment, additional research questions arise: Which parameters are coordinated during a joint action transportation task? In what way does the visual absence of the interaction partner affect the coordination task? What role does haptic feedback play in a transportation task? To answer these questions and to test the new experimental environment we instructed pairs of subjects to perform a classical joint action transportation task: carrying a stretcher through an obstacle course. With this behavioral experiment we demonstrated that joint action behavior (resulting from the coordination task) is a stable process. Even though visual and haptic information about the interaction partner were reduced, humans quickly compensated for the lack of information. After a short time they did not perform significantly differently from normal joint action behavior.