ICE Breaking: Disentangling Factors Affecting the Performance of Immersive Co-creation Environments

Abstract

Engaging users for co-creating alternative solutions and usage scenarios is, as revealed in previous studies, not so obvious. Very often, it necessitates expensive high-tech resources, such as a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), for setting-up an immersive environment in which all project stakeholders, especially users, would feel confortable enough for unleashing their valuable contribution. Our previous empirical study on low-cost immersive environments has unveiled the great potential of close-to-real-life immersion that fulfils the realism principle of a Living Lab facilitating users' contribution to alternative solutions and usage scenarios. However, this previous work had a limit of addressing individuals through their capacity of behaving naturally within different types of immersive platforms. As a step further, this paper presents the outcomes of an investigation to identifying and disentangling factors characterising a group immersion in the context of co-creation instead of an individual's immersion.