The Impact of Social Interaction on Usability for Distributed Virtual Environments

—Distance collaboration has long been a research area for distributed Virtual Environments (VEs). In these environments people interact with the technology and each other in a computer-generated synthetic world. The aim of this paper is to examine how social interaction influences the usability of distributed VEs, focused on the way people handle computer interfaces and graphical representations. The collected data come from two experiments for various problem-solving tasks. The first experiment examined collaboration in networked immersive projection technology and the second collaboration during repetitive usage of personal computers. When observing social interaction in VEs, certain sequences of actions, were identified that supported-and others that disturbed-the flow of collaboration. A main observation is that usability problems are of three different types: 1) problems that are or cannot be observed by the users, 2) problems that have impact only on some users, and 3) problems...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJVR
• Authors: Ilona Heldal
• Keywords: Collaboration, IJVR 2007, Problems, Social Interaction