Human Interaction in Multi-User Virtual Reality
Stephan Streuber, A Chatziastros, S. Tsunoyama · 2007
In this paper we will present an immersive multi- user environment for studying joint action and so- cial interaction. Besides the technical challenges of immersing multiple persons into a single virtual environment, additional research questions arise: Which parameters are coordinated during a joint action transportation task? In what way does the visual absence of the interaction partner affect the coordination task? What role does haptic feed- back play in a transportation task? To answer these questions and to test the new experimental environment we instructed pairs of subjects to per- form a classical joint action transportation task: carrying a stretcher through an obstacle course. With this behavioral experiment we demonstrated that joint action behavior (resulting from the co- ordination task) is a stable process. Even though visual and haptic information about the interac- tion partner were reduced, humans quickly com- pensated for the lack of information. After a short time they did not perform significantly differently from normal joint action behavior.