Negative effects of network latencies in immersive collaborative virtual environments
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Negative effects of network latencies in immersive collaborative virtual environments Armin Becher1 · Jens Angerer2 · Thomas Grauschopf1 Received: 7 December 2018 / Accepted: 24 July 2019 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The present work aims to investigate the negative effects of network latencies in immersive collaborative virtual environments. A user study was conducted to determine the impact of those delays on the performance of users. Participants of the study played a simple cooperative game designed for two players. The goal of the game was to correctly place bicolored cubes into their specific destinations. Since each player only saw the colors of the cubes of his or her partner, both players had to visually and verbally exchange information to complete the game. Each pair of participants played the game under four different latency conditions. The task performance was measured by the time needed to place one cube successfully. Besides, other subjectively observable variables were investigated. The results of the study show that a high end-to-end delay between two VR stations has an adverse effect on the users’ task performance, the amount of mutual understanding and the perceived workload. For the co-presence metric, i.e., the perceived amount of togetherness inside the virtual environment, no significant correlation to the network delay could be determined. Keywords Distributed virtual reality · Latency · Immersive collaborative virtual environment · Performance · Co-presence · Mutual understanding · Perceived workload
1 Introduction Virtual reality (VR) technologies are used in a wide variety of different applications in various industry branches. They can be used for industrial design tasks (Lawson et al. 2016), training simulations (Gavish et al. 2013), medical surgeries (Schreuder et al. 2014), and many other scenarios where working in a virtual environment is beneficial and saves time or cost. Compared to the real-world, VR allows new ways of worldwide collaboration that would otherwise require expensive, time-consuming, and environmentally harmful long-haul flights. With so-called distributed VR systems, * Armin Becher [email protected] Jens Angerer [email protected] Thomas Grauschopf [email protected] 1
Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany
AUDI AG, Ingolstadt, Germany
2
or immersive collaborative virtual environments (ICVEs) (Steptoe et al. 2010), it is possible to work together with other people inside a shared virtual 3D space. In 1996, Olof Hagsand described a VR system that enables globally distributed users to communicate with each other inside a shared virtual environment. After he pointed out the system’s capabilities, he outlined one of the significant challenges when designing distributed virtual worlds: network latency between different VR locations. He concluded that “in such an environment, it is crucial that participants experience “acceptable” delays.” (Hagsand 1996). He did not furthe
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