User perspectives and scales for collaborative classification tasks in immersive environments

Abstract

Immersive technologies offer the possibility of facilitating collaboration through new capabilities, like shifting between different scales or perspectives while keeping a first-person view of the workspace. All these features affect collaboration by influencing user behaviour, sense of copresence, and equality among participants. This research aims to gain insights into how providing different perspectives and scales of the workspace influences collaboration in immersive virtual environments that support data manipulation. To this purpose, we developed a multi-user immersive visualisation that represents the elements of a taxonomy as bubbles floating on a tabletop located in an infinite space. We designed an exploratory user study with 24 participants (12 pairs) who performed a collaborative classification task under three spatial perspective conditions: (1) egocentric condition, where both users are represented in the tabletop with the same scale of the bubbles; (2) exocentric condition, with both users as external viewers of the tabletop, and (3) multiscale condition where one user is represented exocentric and the other one is represented egocentric. We collected quantitative and qualitative data from participants to examine how user and social interaction evolved over time in each perspective. We identified user behaviours that might suggest design implications for future collaborative visualisations.