Effects of multi-symbols on enhancing virtual reality based collaborative task

Applying virtual reality (VR) technologies to enhance learning becomes more and more popular. This research intends to investigate how multi-symbolic representations could help users being aware of collaborative context and partner's needs to enhance completing haptics-based collaborative tasks in a co-located/distant virtual environment. This study evaluates the performance of collaboration including the completing time and the number of failure in completing a task. To make users being aware of context, multi-symbolic representations in forms of color and text are provided as well as haptics and audio feedback in the virtual environment. Participants in the experiment were separated into four groups with the combinations of two variables: w/o multi-symbols and co-located/distant. The results show that multi-symbols significantly helped users reduce the time in completing a task in the case of co-located collaborative virtual environment. However, there was no significant improvement in performance in the case of distant collaborative virtual environment. From our on-site observation, we found users had less verbal communication in strategies to complete the task though microphone and speaker provided on both sides within a distant virtual environment, therefore, effects of multi-symbols cannot be revealed to the performance of collaboration. Furthermore, to investigate how multi-symbols could affect user's perceptions, we investigate the perceived awareness, presence and social presence of our proposed system and its influence on perceived usefulness, ease of use and playfulness based on Technology Acceptance Model. The results showed that awareness, presence and social presence significantly influenced perceived usefulness, ease of use and playfulness. Therefore, our proposed multi-symbols virtual reality system has potentials to help collaborative learning.