Navigation Aids in Collaborative Virtual Environments: Comparison of 3DML, Audio, Textual, Arrows-Casting

For Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), many interaction techniques are developed. Depending on the purpose of the collaborative work, techniques of interaction and manipulation change from one application to another. There is no general, good and efficient solution for all the collaborative systems. In addition, people in CVEs also use communication channels to share task goals, task decomposition and task progress. Therefore, awareness and communication are usually considered as important instruments to complete collaborative task. In this paper we present a comparative study of user performance with assembly task across four different guidance navigation aids i.e. 3-Dimensional Map-Liner (3DML), Audio, Textual and Arrows-Casting. Dijkstra's algorithm is used for shortest path selection while making the assembly task in CVEs. We conducted experiments on different college students to check the performance of the students. We reported the results of a precise experiments containing of 24 virtual teams of 48 individual students. Overall results showed that students performed task faster using the arrows while they were slow with audio support in navigation.