GroupMorph: A group collaboration mode approach to shared virtual environments for product design

Ab Virtual reality technology is increasingly being applied to globally distributed teams engaged in collaborative product design. Observations of product design teams have suggested four distinct modes of collaboration—complementary, competitive, peer to-peer, and leader-follower. Another insight from observation is that collaboration consists of fluid transitions between these modes in the accomplishment of the design task, driven by a flexible process of subgrouping and regrouping which reflects the structure and progress of the task. Yet most collaborative virtual environment systems support only one mode of collaboration—peer-to-peer—and those that do explicitly support multiple modes or roles do not allow fluid transitions between them in the context of the same task. In addition, no explicit support is provided to allow subgroups to be formed and dissolved.; To address the operating hypothesis that a collaborative virtual environment that supports such group collaboration modes is better than one that does not, a collaborative virtual environment for product design that supports multiple collaboration modes and fluid transitions is described; two metaphors for collaborative product design (collaboration tree and infinitely recursive conference room) are introduced; the use of a collaboration tree interface widget is detailed; the Shared Simple Virtual Environment (SSVE) toolkit for collaborative virtual environments is presented; and a set of experiments and metrics that test the operating hypothesis is analyzed. The result is that the operating hypothesis was confirmed, but for unexpected reasons.; In addition, a hierarchy of concurrency control methods for closely coupled collaboration in multithreaded virtual environments is explained in detail, a set of experiments that investigate the effect of avatar representation on task performance is discussed, and an experiment to investigate the impact of the virtual reality interface on closely coupled collaborative tasks is examined.