VR-Replay: Capturing and Replaying Avatars in VR for Asynchronous 3D Collaborative Design

Distributed teams rely on asynchronous CMC tools to complete collaborative tasks due to the difficulties and costs surrounding scheduling synchronous communications. In this paper, we present VR-Replay, a new communication tool that records and replays avatars with both nonverbal behavior and verbal communication in VR asynchronous collaboration. We describe a study comparing VR-Replay with a desktop-based CVE with audio annotation and a VR immersive CVE with audio annotation. Our results suggest that viewing the replay avatar in VR-Replay improves teamwork, causing people to view their partners as more likable, warm, and friendly. 75% of the users chose VR-Replay as the preferred communication tool in our study.

1 Introduction

Temporal and geographic dispersion in distributed team can complicate communication, as the nonverbal behaviors available in face-to-face interactions are absent. Despite that fact that collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) enable distributed team members to work together synchronously or asynchronously, to date, much of the work in CVEs has been dedicated to real-time collaboration [3], [4]. Some CVEs [1], [2] do allow people to create and view text, audio or video annotations, either on desktop or in virtual reality (VR), which can aid asynchronous communication. However, these methods do not capture nonverbal information that could contextualize speech. Thus, we present VR-Replay, a new communication tool in VR that records and replays avatars with both nonverbal behavior and verbal communication.