Importance of communication influences on a highly collaborative task

Social interaction is a key driving force behind any team activity. Real time closely coupled interaction, where we quickly see the effect of our actions on others, is an important feature of social interaction. For example, smiling and returning a smile, shaking hands and passing a gift or business card are some of the most important interactions in the real world. Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) offer the potential for social interaction between geographically distributed groups. Closely coupled interaction is, however, very difficult in present CVE systems. This is because this medium lags behind real world communication in terms of representation, consistency and responsiveness. This paper takes a psychological perspective, describing how the primary forms of human communication in the real world map to those in the virtual. We discuss how each form of communication relates to the feeling of co-presence, giving real examples of behaviour observed in an example application, the virtual gazebo. We present detailed results from user evaluation, focusing on the perceived importance of these influences on collaboration.