Collaboration upon Heterogeneous Platforms - from Desktop PC to Handheld Device

Nowadays, handheld wireless devices are being widely used by people to collaborate with one another using same handheld device in field or using desktop PC in office. Therefore, to study the effects of platform heterogeneity on task performance in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) is helpful to improve future collaboration efficiency. In this paper, an experiment with highly interactive task was designed to study these effects. The task performance was evaluated under different combinations of three platforms: PC with a sensor, PDA with a stylus and PDA with direction buttons. The experiment results indicate that for simple 3D collaboration task, if right type of visualization and input device was chosen, we would be satisfied with performance both on homogeneous platforms and heterogeneous platforms