People often rely on workspace awareness to collaborate with one another, especially in learning and problem-solving tasks. Workspace awareness is defined as an understanding of a current state of the work environment and collaborators’ activities. However, workspace awareness is difficult to maintain in virtual environments (VE), since some information from the real world is missing. Fortunately, VEs are flexible and can be designed to compensate for a lack of real world cues. This thesis aims to improve collaborative workspace awareness through enhancing the design of VEs. Our proposed approaches improve workspace awareness in three ways. The first approach examines space configurations that could improve awareness in a collaboration. The second explores different strategies fo...[ Read more ]

People often rely on workspace awareness to collaborate with one another, especially in learning and problem-solving tasks. Workspace awareness is defined as an understanding of a current state of the work environment and collaborators’ activities. However, workspace awareness is difficult to maintain in virtual environments (VE), since some information from the real world is missing. Fortunately, VEs are flexible and can be designed to compensate for a lack of real world cues. This thesis aims to improve collaborative workspace awareness through enhancing the design of VEs. Our proposed approaches improve workspace awareness in three ways. The first approach examines space configurations that could improve awareness in a collaboration. The second explores different strategies for updating the visual environment so that users are aware of their collaborators’ actions. The third focuses on finding visual cues that raise the user’s awareness when collaborating with multiple users. Prior research studies suggested that users operate in workspace to manage their attention and divide their tasks when working in the real world. The space within the users’ reach is often assigned as a private space and the space out of users’ reach is assigned as a group space. Following this approach, we propose to set up a virtual space in a desktop virtual reality environment by assigning the space in front of the desktop screen as a private space and the space behind the screen as a group space. According to our user study, this setup improves collaborations between users.

To gain further insight into information sharing strategies in VEs, a user study was conducted to compare different strategies for updating the VEs in complex remote problem-solving tasks. From the study, real-time updating is found to be not suitable for workspace awareness, especially when users are performing different tasks. On the other hand, an updating strategy that updates only information that is relevant to the users’ actions performs the best. Moreover, users change collaboration strategies depending on the update timing. Design guidelines are proposed from the user study as a direction for different collaborative situations.

While there are many research works that allow users to work together in one-to-one collaborations, less attention has been paid to one-to-many collaborations. This is due to the lack of visual awareness cues that allow users to spectate multiple users. To alleviate this limitation, a prototype system named ObserVAR is proposed. ObserVAR utilizes Augmented Reality (AR) technology to help an instructor in spectating multiple Virtual Reality (VR) users by augmenting the instructor’s environment with virtual awareness cues generated from the VR users. In the development of ObserVAR, different awareness cues are compared in a user study to determine its suitability under various circumstances. The virtual awareness cues are then optimized further using techniques derived from graph visualization to reduce visual clutter.

Finally, the knowledge gained from improving workspace awareness using different approaches is used to formulate a collaborative framework for learning and problem-solving tasks. The contributions of this thesis include an enhanced design of desktop virtual reality for collaborations; multiple improvements in workspace awareness across different aspects; the design and development of the ObserVAR system for one-to-many collaborations; and a framework for collaborative problem-solving that utilizes the proposed designs. This thesis explores various enhancements of VEs, which lead to a better performance in collaborative learning and problem-solving tasks. The VE designs in this thesis can be used as guidelines for future collaborative problem-solving systems.