![](bg6.png)
present the same analysis for “placing cubes” in the
no-communication case (see figure 9).
Figure 9: Block placing within no-communication case.
The graph of no-communication case shows a
more balanced trend with less extreme values. There
is also not much data spread for the homogeneous
case which was caused by more balanced collabora-
tion.
The results obtained in this comparative study of
homogeneous and heterogeneous setups can be used
in 2 ways. The first conclusion that can be drawn here
is that unequal interaction (in terms of I/O devices)
can decrease the efficiency and contribution of one of
the participants, and cause an uncomfortable experi-
ence for these participants in a CVE. However as, in
reality, the device that is most suited for performing
a task is not always available, we can conclude that
a heterogeneous setup still allows users to work in an
efficient manner. On the other hand, we can think
about other types of tasks to be performed in a CVE,
where participants have limited abilities and should
perform different tasks to achieve the common goal.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The results obtained in this case study have an im-
portant impact for the implementation of collabora-
tive virtual environments. One implication is that in-
clusion of communication is important when working
together in a virtual environment, since this allows
the participants to explicitly divide the work. Com-
munication also increases the feeling of collaborating
together but at the same moment decreases the per-
formance. Another important result is that the com-
bination of different devices does not significantly in-
fluence the collaboration as no interaction effect of
the devices that can be combined was found. To in-
crease the efficiency of heterogeneous collaboration
we can think of other activities to be performed in
the VE where every participant can supplement each
other performance. Of course further research is nec-
essary to explore other aspects of successful collabo-
ration.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research described in this paper is directly funded
by Hasselt University through the BOF framework.
The authors would like to thank Lode Vanacken
for his assistance with the implementation and Roel
Braeken of the UHasselt Center for Statistics for help-
ing to choose the statistical tests.
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