Virtual collaboration: effect of spatial configuration on spatial statements production.

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Science
• Virtual Reality

Background:

• Effective spatial information sharing is crucial for remote collaboration in virtual environments.
• Current methods often impose a high cognitive load on operators due to addressee-perspective reliance.
• Improving collaborative virtual environments requires understanding spatial statement production under varying spatial configurations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the cognitive workload associated with producing spatial statements in virtual environments.
• To analyze how variations in speaker, addressee, and target positions affect cognitive load.
• To identify specific spatial configurations that lead to increased mental demand during collaboration.

Main Methods:

• Twenty-two participants provided instructions to a virtual collaborator in a 3D environment.
• Sixty-four configurations of avatar orientation and target location were tested.
• Measures included instruction delay, duration, and subjective mental demand, with spatial reference frames classified.

Main Results:

• Instruction delay was influenced by ego-centered and addressee-centered spatial information processing.
• All subsequent measures (duration, mental demand) were driven by mental transformations in addressee-centered coordinates.
• A specific configuration (target diagonally behind addressee) significantly increased speaker's mental demand.

Conclusions:

• Spatial communication in virtual environments is cognitively demanding, particularly when adopting an addressee-centered perspective.
• The speaker invests significant mental effort to minimize collaborative effort, especially in challenging configurations.
• Development of tools to facilitate spatial communication and reduce cognitive workload in virtual collaboration is recommended.