Avatar-Model Interaction in Virtual Worlds Improves Distributed Team Collaboration through Issue Discovery
Anne Anderson, Carrie Sturts Dossick · Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (2014) · 2014
In this study, we observed distributed construction engineering management teams as they discovered issues in building models while collaborating in a 3D virtual world. This paper contributes to visualization and building information modeling (BIM) literature by exploring how the affordances of the media-rich 3D environment of a virtual world support mutual discovery of construction coordination issues among team members. In Winter/Spring 2013, graduate and undergraduate students from four globally distributed universities met in three teams once a week for eleven weeks. Numerous communication affordances were available to the teams - both within and external to the virtual world - including voice, text chat, screen-sharing, and exploring avatar-scaled models imported into the virtual world. When exploring the imported model, individuals controlled their own viewpoint by "walking" through the building as an avatar using the arrow keys on a keyboard and, as a result, all members of the team were able to view the model together, regardless of BIM experience. We found the rate of issue discovery to be significantly higher in the avatar-scaled models compared to other methods of viewing the model - such as passively viewing the model on a 2D shared screen - indicating that bringing team members and building models into the same interactional space is more effective for quickly discovering coordination issues.