Effects of Group Synchronization Control in Networked Virtual Environments with Avatars

By subjective assessment, this paper investigates the effects of group (or inter-destination) synchronization control in networked virtual environments where users have a conversation with each other by using avatars constructed by computer graphics (CG) and live voices. Assessment results show that the fairness among the users can be maintained high under the group synchronization control in networked competitive work. We also demonstrate that the synchronization quality of networked collaborative work can be improved under the group synchronization control. In addition, we make an experiment in which we use videos instead of avatars, and we examine the difference between results of the avatar case and those of the video case.