Collaborative Problem Solving in Local and Remote VR Situations

Virtual Reality supports collaboration among partners across departments and fields, independent of physical boundaries. Virtual reality applications can solve the time and cost consuming logistic problem that companies encounter when sending experts to remote locations. However, it is not yet clear how effective partners collaborate when in remote locations. In one experiment, we examined whether partners who are physically in the same room and interact with each other before they start collaborating affects performance compared to collaborators who meet and interact only within the virtual space. Participants had to solve a Rubik's cube type three-dimensional puzzle by arranging cubes that varied in color within a solution space in such a way, so that each side of the solution space showed a single color. Participants were immersed within a virtual environment and in one condition participants were collocated in the same room (local condition), while in the other one they were located in different rooms (remote condition). Results showed that collaborators in both conditions successfully completed the task but performance was better during the local compared to the remote condition.