The effect of combined aids on users performance in collaborative virtual environments

For Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), many interaction techniques have been developed. Depending on the purpose of the collaborative work, techniques of interaction and manipulation change from one application to another. There is no general, good and efficient solution for all the collaborative systems. In addition, people in CVEs also use communication channels to share task goals, task decomposition and task progress. Therefore, awareness and communications are usually considered as important instruments to complete collaborative task. In this paper, we have combined different virtual navigation aids i.e. 3DML + audio, 3DML + textual, 3DML + arrows-casting, arrows-casting + audio, arrows-casting + textual and audio + textual; and presented a comparative study of user performance to perform an assembly task in CVEs. We reported the results of a precise experiment containing, 30 virtual teams of 60 individual students. Overall, results showed that students performed task faster using 3DML + arrows-casting while they were slow with audio + textual support in navigation.