On the Use of Multi-sensory Cues in Symmetric and Asymmetric Shared Collaborative Virtual Spaces

Physical face-to-face collaboration with someone gives a higher-quality experience compared to mediated communication options, such as a phone- or video-based chat. Participants can share rich sensory cues to multiple human senses in a physical space. Also, the perceptual sensing of the surrounding environment including other peoples' reactions can influence human communication and emotion, and thus collaborative performance. Shared spaces in virtual environments provide degraded sensory experiences because most commercial virtual reality systems typically provide only visual and audio feedback. The impact of richer, multi-sensory feedback on joint decision-making tasks in VR is still an open area of research. Two independent studies exploring this topic are presented in this paper. We implemented a multi-sensory system that delivers vision, audio, tactile, and smell feedback, and we compared the system to a typical VR system. The scenario placed two users in a virtual theme-park safari ride with a number of non-player character (NPC) passengers to simulate realistic scenarios compared to the real-world and we varied the type and complexity of NPCs reactions to participants. In Experiment 1, we provided both users with either multi-sensory or typical sensory feedback symmetrically as a between-subjects factor, and used NPC reaction type as a within-subjects factor. In Experiment 2, we provided sensory feedback asymmetrically to each user (i.e., one had multi-sensory cues and the other had typical sensory cues) as a between-subjects factor, and used NPC reaction type as a within-subjects factor. We found that the number of sensory channels and NPC reactions did not influence user perception significantly under either symmetric or asymmetric sensory feedback conditions. However, after accounting for individual personality traits (e.g., assertive, passive), as well as any existing relationship between the pairs, we found that increasing the number of sensory channels can significantly improve subjective responses.