Collaboration in Multi-modal Virtual Worlds: Comparing Touch, Text, Voice and Video

Social aspects of virtual reality is an area of research that has expanded as the technology has matured. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) show great promise for investigating how human-human interaction works. The reason for this is that the mode of communication as well as task contexts, spatial affordances, information presentation and manipulation of common objects can be varied in order to understand the effects of - and interrelations between - these factors. The communication mode is often text-chat in virtual environments, and audio or video channels are used less often. It has only recently become possible to support other human senses like touch in three-dimensional virtual environments. In this chapter my main interest is in comparing the different communication modes, such as textchat, voice communication and video conferencing, and investigating the effect of supporting the touch modality. Evaluation of collaboration through different communication modes is not as common in the area of CVEs as in the area of telecommunications and computer-mediated communication (CMC). One reason for this is that social psychology has not had a large impact on research in the field of CVEs. In social psychological studies of mediated interaction, the focus of interest is, for example, on how people can build and sustain relations, prevent and solve conflicts, and collaborate to attain joint goals [1]. A general argument that a number of theories make is that the social richness of the communication medium has to be matched with the task in order for collaborators to accomplish these