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A Study of Virtual Environments for Enterprise Collaboration

Aditya Zutshi ∗

Geetika Sharma †

TATA Consultancy Services Innovation Labs, Delhi

Abstract

Globally distributed workforces in enterprises are commonplacethese days due to the increasing popularity of the off-shore busi-ness model. One of the challenges faced by these enterprises isenabling effective collaboration between geographically separatedteams while keeping operational costs to a minimum. Although anumber of tools have been developed for collaboration, online vir-tual environments (VEs) open up huge possibilities. In this paper,we present the results of a pilot study we conducted on the usabilityand acceptability of some popular virtual environments for collab-oration within an enterprise. Based on our evaluation, we analyse

where the current class of VEs lack and prescribe some good prac-tices for their use.

Keywords: user study, virtual environments, enterprise collabora-tion

1 Introduction

With of fices worldwide, and customers and business partnersspread across the globe, organizations are trying to find a way of collaborating that is as productive as face-to-face meetings and ca-pable of supporting groups of large sizes. A large number of col-laboration tools ranging from web conferencing to integrated suitesthat can create knowledge repositories and enable document shar-ing, meeting and conversations [Weiseth et al. 2006] are availabletoday.

Online virtual environments (VEs) are becoming increasingly pop-ular after the unprecedented success of Second Life [Second Life ].Although a large share of users log into VEs for gaming or socialis-

ing, enterprises are looking for ways to leverage this technology forincreasing productivity and reducing costs. VEs have a potential forimproving collaboration, [Brown and Bell 2006], as they provide ashared space into which multiple users can log in from differentparts of the world and interact with each other in real-time. Whilethis interaction can be for fun, it can also be for work. The com-monly used collaboration tools such as text and VoIP chat, videosharing, document sharing and so on, can be integrated in a 3Dspace in a manner that provides for better organisation and compre-hension of different data streams. Also, since the real-world is 3D,our minds are wired to naturally interact and process information in3D spaces.

In this paper we present the results of a study we conducted to eval-uate the usability and acceptability of VEs for collaboration in anenterprise. We analyse what features of a virtual environment are

∗This work was done while Aditya Zutshi was with TCS Innovation

Labs, Delhi†email:[email protected]

important for collaboration and compare three specific virtual envi-ronments. We highlight areas of improvement in the current stateof the art VEs and suggest some good practices to follow in settingup and using VEs. This paper is organised as follows. In section 2,we give a brief background of VEs. We describe our study and itsresults in section 3 and conclude in section 4.

2 Online Virtual Environments

A virtual environment (VE) is a shared, persistent computer simu-lated space into which multiple users can interact with each otherin real-time [Bartle 2004]. The environment is governed by a setof rules or physics, that allow users to cause changes in it. As theuser navigates through the environment a view of the current stateof the world is presented to him. The user’s view started out, his-

torically, from being textual (e.g. MUDs [The MUD Connector ]),2.5D (e.g. EverQuest [EverQuest ]) to full 3D e.g.Ultima Online[Ultima Online ], Second Life [Second Life ]). Textual environ-ments provide a text-based description of the world and the peoplein it. The text may be marked up with colours to add meaning. A2.5D world allows 2D user navigation with a fixed isometric viewthat creates an impression of 3D while a full 3D world allows theuser 3D navigation and to view the world from almost any orienta-tion. Since our study is concerned with 3D VEs, we focus on thesein the remainder of the paper.

The current class of online 3D VEs allows multiple users to connectover a network in a shared space that is built using 3D graphicalobjects. The objects may be scripted to behave in a desired man-ner. Users in the environment are represented as avatars which arecustomisable 3D graphical models, usually with a human-like ap-pearance. The user’s interaction in the virtual space is through theavatar. To move around in the space, the user navigates his avatar.The user’s view of the space is created by setting up a camera withrespect to the avatar. This could be, for example, afirst person viewin which the camera position and orientation coincides with that of the avatar’s head or a third person view in which the camera is aboveand behind the avatar’s head. Avatar’s may be animated to performgestures and actions to make the interaction more meaningful andengaging.

User’s can communicate with each other through private or pub-lic text messages or VoIP calls. Many environments are enabledwith 3D positional audio which processes audio exchange betweenavatars according to their proximity and relative placement in thevirtual space. In other words, a user can hear only those whose

avatars are close enough to his and their voices fade away as avatarsmove away from each other. Also, voices appear to come from theleft or right depending on the relative positions of avatars.

Most VEs, e.g. Second Life [Second Life ], Project Wonderland[Project Wonderland ], OpenSimulator [OpenSim ], are built on theclient-server model. The server maintains all the information aboutthe world and sends regular updates to all connected clients. Theclients have a graphical rendering engine that uses the informationsent by the server to render a view of the world according to thepreferences, e.g. camera view etc., set by the user.

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(a)

(b)

Table 1: (a) Second Life and (b) RealXtend Conference Rooms

3 Our Study

We conducted a pilot study of three VEs to determine their usabilityand acceptability for productive use in an enterprise. These wereSecond Life [Second Life ], RealXtend [RealXtend ] and Qwaq[Qwaq ].Out of these, RealXtend, table 1 (b), is open-source, washosted on our own servers and had . Second Life, table 1 (a), ishosted on the Internet by its parent company Linden Labs and isfree for anyone to use. Qwaq is a proprietary application whosetrial version, hosted by its parent company, was used for the study.The reason for choosing environments for hosted differently was totest the performance of each hosting option.

The participants of the experiments were experienced professionalsof the IT Industry, in the age group 25 to 55, and were familiar withthe available suite of collaboration tools. Two thirds of the partici-pants were males and less than half had experience of 3D gaming.We organized activities like general discussions, meetings, presen-

tations, document editing and the participants were asked to fill outa questionnaire at the end. Participants were asked questions intwo categories. The first consisted of questions on different fea-tures common to three VEs and the second consisted of questionson comparison of the three.

For the experiments, we used mobile workstations by Hewlett-Packard with Intel(R) Core (TM)2 Duo CPU T7700 @ 2.40 GHz2.40 GHz processor, ATI FireGL Graphics Card, 2.00 GB RAMand Windows VistaTM Business Service Pack 1 to run the clients,with an Internet Connection of 1 MBPS.

3.1 General Features of Virtual Environments

User Representation: Almost all the participants (86%) were com-

fortable with having an avatar as a representation of themselves inthe VE. The rest felt uncomfortable with the lack of similarity be-tween the avatar and the actual person it represented in terms of facial resemblance and age. Most of the participants (86%) verystrongly felt the need to have the ability to change the avatar’s ap-pearance. The participants who were uncomfortable being repre-sented by an avatar were among those who rated this feature ex-tremely high. The remaining participants rated it moderately im-portant.

A little more than half of the participants didn’t change their appear-ance after logging in for thefirst time. This was unexpected as most

of the participants believed that the ability to change the appear-ance was extremely important. Most of them stated that they wereuncomfortable with the interface of the VE and therefore, didn’tchange their avatar’s appearance. This indicates the need for ade-quate training on the environment.

Gestures: Most of the participants believe that avatar gestures areextremely important form of non-verbal communication. The inter-face for triggering a gesture in all the three clients was through key-board/mouse. Almost all the participants found this unnatural anddif ficult to use. They felt the need of capturing gestures through apassive and non-invasive interface like cameras.

A large share of participants (71%) felt that a restricted set of ges-tures was necessary for of ficial scenarios. They were of the opinionthat situation based rules should be defined and the gestures should

conform to those rules. For example, avatar’s should not be allowedto fly or dance in a meeting room. A small percentage of partici-pants (29%) believed that in a VE, they should be free from therules of the real world and that having situation based gestures isnot necessary.

Camera and Graphics: A majority (57%) preferred the third per-son camera view to the first person view (29%). A small share of participants (13%) found both views to be equally necessary. The

participants unanimously stated that good graphics were absolutelymandatory to create a feeling of immersiveness in the VE. Most of the participants (71%) felt that having a collaborative virtual spacelook like an of fice setup was extremely important.

Navigation: A large percentage of participants preferred walkingto flying in the VE. They did less than 20% of their total movementby flying. A small percentage of people used flying for 20%-40%of their total movement. As mentioned earlier, a large share of theparticipants felt that flying should be restricted in closed spaces.

Communication: Most of the participants preferred voice chat totext chat while a smaller percentage used both almost equally. Ap-prox 85% of the participants did more than 50% of the total com-munication through voice chat. Around 15% of the participantsused text chat slightly more than the Voice Chat. The participants

feel that the ability to whisper or do side conversations is absolutelyrequired and would make the VE feel more realistic.

Document Editing: Most of the participants (83%) rate the fea-ture of in-world document editing to be absolutely mandatory forcollaboration. They feel that there should be features to open adocument, edit, save and share in-world. There should be an easy

interface supporting this feature. They also feel that it is importantthat others are able to see the changes someone is making. The rest(17%)find this feature to be moderately important. Approximatelytwo-third of the participants finds the feature of desktop sharing tobe absolutely mandatory for collaboration. The rest find this featureto be moderately important.

3.2 Comparison between the Virtual Environments

In this section, we present the results of a comparison between thethree VEs Second Life, RealXtend and Qwaq. The participantswere asked to rate different features of the environment, like re-alism of avatars, graphics, voice clarity and so on, on a ten-pointscale.

Graphics: The Second Life and RealXtend virtual spaces werecustom built by us while in Qwaq a meeting room was created us-ing their templates. Second Life allows users to build their spaceusing the graphical tool in-built in their client, while RealXtend al-lows this as well as meshes created in external modelling tools to

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(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Table 2: Average Score for Various Features

be uploaded. The Second Life space was built as a standard meet-ing room, while in RealXtend, we created a virtual replica of ourown of fice. The Qwaq meeting room allows one to add pre-createdobjects like chairs, tables and screens on walls that could be white-

boards, web browsers or documents for editing.

The participants rated RealXtend and Second Life quite high on thequality of graphics, table 2 (a). These environments were immer-sive and kept the participants engaged. Qwaq on the other handhad unrealistic graphics. RealXtend scored the highest for the per-ceived speed of rendering. Second Life performed almost equallywell. Qwaq had a lot of delays in rendering and scored the least,table 2 (b).

Voice Clarity and Lag: RealXtend scored the highest for voiceclarity. Second Life was also rated close. Qwaq was rated very low,table 2 (c). For all the environments, one major problem faced wasof echo. The experiments were conducted using the speakers andmicrophone in-built in the laptops. As there is no implementationof echo cancellation on the clients, a recommended practice is to

use the push-to-talk mode while speaking or earphones.

RealXtend had the minimum time perceived lag in audio and scoredthe highest, table 2 (d). Second Life also performed almost equallywell. Qwaq had a lot of time lag in audio and for most of the time,the audio chat was suspended for a considerable number of partic-ipants. Also, Qwaq tried to make up for delays by speeding up theplayback. This lead to uncanny and disturbing distortions in audio.

Realism of Avatars: The participants rated the avatars in SecondLife to be the most realistic with average score 5.71, RealXtendsecond best with a score of 5.16 and Qwaq third with a low scoreof 1.86. Although, Second Life and RealXtend were rated almostequally, their score was in the middle of the scale implying thatthere is much scope of improvement in avatars.

Based on their experiences, the participants were asked to evalu-ate the different VEs taking into consideration the features and thequality of service offered by them. The participants rated SecondLife the highest at 5.86 on a scale of 10. RealXtend was rated at5.67 on a scale of 10 while Qwaq was rated at 2.57.

3.3 Discussion

Out of all the three VEs, Qwaq scored the least primarily becauseof unrealistic avatars, poor graphics, delays in rendering and audioand poor voice clarity even though it had the maximum number of

features for collaboration. RealXtend had the least delays and thiswas because it was hosted on our local network. Although SecondLife and RealXtend emerged as the top two virtual worlds, theywere placed in the middle of the scale. This indicates that users’expectations from VEs for collaboration are far from being met bythe current state of the art environments.

4 Conclusion

We found that most participants were open to using VEs for col-laboration. However, the following are important for them to be ef-fective. Firstly, as with any new technology, people need adequatetraining to be able to use a VE optimally. Secondly, network ef fi-ciency is extremely critical for such environments. In cases wherethe users are all part of one organisation, it is better to have a locallyhosted environment rather than one which is external. Also, sincesuch environments are being considered to aid and increase produc-tivity, they must perform with minimal latency. Thirdly, realism of the environment both in terms of user representation and graphi-cal models has a big impact on the experience. Since people know

their colleagues from the real-world, they expect their avatars toalso be like them and deviations can be disturbing. Also, if the vir-tual space is built like a real-world space the users are familiar with,their of fice in this case, users take to the environment more easily as

they immediately know how to get around. Finally, real-world rulesmust apply in the VE as well. The decorum and behaviour that isobserved in a real-world work environment must be followed in thevirtual world as well. This may be implemented by controlling theabilities of avatars in different virtual scenarios.

References

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BROWN, B., AN D BEL L, M. 2006. ‘there’ as a collaborative virtualenvironment. In Proceedings of CSCW 2006 , ACM Press, ACM.

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QWAQ. http://www.qwaq.com.

REA LXTEND. http://www.realxtend.org.

SECOND LIF E. http://www.secondlife.com.

THE MUD CONNECTOR. http://www.mudconnect.com.

ULTIMA ONLINE. http://www.uoherald.com.

WEISETH, P. E ., MUNKVOLD, B. E ., TVEDTE, B ., AN D

LARSEN, S. 2006. The wheel of collaboration tools: A ty-pology for analysis within a holistic framework. In Proceedingsof CSCW 2006 , ACM Press, ACM.

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