In my quest to understand the background behind what I am performing research on, I have decided that I will use a few blog posts over the course of the school year to write reviews of relevant research papers.
This week I have chosen:
Dodds, T.J. and Mohler, B.J. and Bülthoff, H.H. A Communication Task in HMD Virtual Environments:
Speaker and Listener Movement Improves Communication. CASA: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual
Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (2010).
Dodds et al. conducted an experiment in which they had subjects perform a communication task in the virtual environment while providing both participants with a self-avatar. They had a 2x2x2 experimental design. The variables in each condition were: the speaker's avatar (static vs. animated), the listener's avatar (static vs. animated) and the perspective (1st person camera view vs. 3rd person camera view). The task required two people, one as the speaker and one as the listener. The speaker had to describe as many words, as provided by the experimenter, to the listener as possible in 3 minutes, while the listener guessed the words that were being described. The task was also performed in the real world for comparison purposes.
The performance measures in this experiment were the average speed of the dominant hand of the speaker during the task, as an indication of the amount of gesturing by the speaker, as well as the average number of words correctly described and guessed in a 3 minute time period.
The results show that the average speed of the dominant hand is highest in the real world, but there is also a significant increase in hand speed in the tracked-tracked-third person condition compared against the other conditions. This condition also yielded the highest average amount of guessed words.
This experiment emphasizes the importance of having a body in the virtual environment. Those conditions where the actors were provided with animated avatars performed better than the other conditions and also behaved more closely to real-world behavior, with regards to the amount of gesturing.
Dodds et al. assert that communication is "an essential subtask of any collaborative virtual environment." This work will be important when setting up and analyzing the results of my experiment. My participants will be performing a non-verbal task, i.e. playing catch, and there are elements of non-verbal communication which will help them to better understand how/when/where the ball will be thrown that will be pivotal in their success.
Both verbal and non-verbal communication are huge players in the way that we perform tasks and learn from each other, and figuring out how to optimize the amount of communication available to the users of a virtual environment is an important step toward improving the relevance and usefulness of virtual reality.
