User's behaviours in a collaborative task - real vs. virtual environments

This paper reports the results of a pilot study evaluating the performance of healthy volunteers working in pairs to fulfil a collaborative task in both real and virtual environments. The main aim of this study is to investigate how different environments (real vs. virtual) and communication modalities (with vs. without talking to each other) affect the quality of interaction between humans. The results suggest that doing the task in the virtual world was more difficult and required more effort to complete than doing it in the real world even though the virtual world task was reported to be more engaging. Participants employed different strategies in each environment in order to successfully complete each task. The results from this study could be used to develop a more elaborate model that predicts each user's behaviour in a collaborative task, which could in turn be used for remote interaction between users mediated by robotic/haptic interfaces.