Mobile Group Dynamics in Large-Scale Collaborative Virtual Environments

Abstract

We have developed techniques called mobile group dynamics (MGDs), which help groups of people to work together while they travel around large-scale virtual environments. MGDs explicitly showed the groups that people had formed themselves into, and helped people move around together and communicate over extended distances. The techniques were evaluated in the context of an urban planning application, by providing one batch of participants with MGDs and another with an interface based on conventional collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Participants with MGDs spent nearly twice as much time in close proximity (within 10m of their nearest neighbor), communicated seven times more than participants with a conventional interface, and exhibited real-world patterns of behavior such as staying together over an extended period of time and regrouping after periods of separation. The study has implications for CVE designers, because it shows how MGDs improves groupwork in CVEs.