Quantifying the benefits of immersion for collaboration in virtual environments

Collaborative Virtual Environments allow multiple users to interact collaboratively while taking advantage of the perceptual richness that Virtual Environments (VEs) provide. In this paper, we demonstrate empirically that increasing the level of immersion in a VE can have a beneficial effect on the usability of that environment in a collaborative context. We present the results of a study in which we varied two immersive factors, stereo and head tracking, within the context of a two person collaborative task. Our results indicate that stereo can have a positive effect on task performance; that different levels of immersion have effects that vary with gender; and that varying the level of immersion has a pronounced effect on communication between users. These results show that the level of immersion can play an important role in determining user performance on some collaborative tasks.