Communication is a fundamental process in collaborative work. In natural conditions, communication between team members is multimodal. This allows for redundancy, adaptation to different contexts, and different levels of focus. In collaborative virtual environments, however, hardware limitations and lack of appropriate interaction metaphors reduce the amount of collaboration. In this poster, we propose the design and use of a vibrotactile language to improve user intercommunication in CVE and, consequently, to increase the amount of effective collaboration.

Collaboration in 3D environments has the main goal of attaining a high degree of teamwork by exposing the team to a suitable level of immersion. However, users within virtual environments have limitations to perceive the same stimuli of the real world. Particularly, the feeling of presence and nearness of the other is difficult to be generated in VR systems. This poster presents a work in progress that shows our current results on evaluating the impact of three different proximity cues for generating awareness of the presence of other. The design of each cue aims at independently stimulating the senses of sight, hearing and touch. The experiment design includes the comparison with a baseline condition in virtual environments where no specific stimulation is applied.

Any human-computer interface imposes a certain level of cognitive load to the user task. Analogously, the task itself also imposes different levels of cognitive load. It is common sense in 3D user interfaces research that a higher number of degrees of freedom increases the interface cognitive load. If the cognitive load is significant, it might compromise the user performance and undermine the evaluation of user skills in a virtual environment. In this paper, we propose an assessment of two immersive VR interfaces with varying degrees of freedom in two VR tasks: risk perception and basic object selection. We examine the effectiveness of both interfaces in these two different tasks. Results show that the number of degrees of freedom does not significantly affect a basic selection task, but it affects risk perception task in an unexpected way.