Subjective evaluation of group user QoE in collaborative virtual environment (CVE)

Interest in the applications of Extended Reality is growing across many different domains. Collaborative or shared experiences are seen as a primary use case. However, there is a surprisingly little research efforts on collaborative design tasks not considering social experiences using Virtual Reality (VR). In addition, there are very few research studies that have focused on the Quality of Experience (QoE) of small user groups working together on collaborative tasks. In this paper, the authors present the results of an experimental study conducted to understand user experience of collaborative tasks using Virtual Reality. The paper presents some initial analysis from self-reported questionnaire data. Two users allocated different roles (Describer and Finder) join remotely to perform the design task collaboratively in immersive VR. The results presented compare user QoE between the two groups (Describer Group vs Finder Group) and considers how different roles and position produces different levels of immersion, interaction, collaboration, post-usage acceptability and system-related consequences. Self-reported measures via post-test questionnaire (15-questions) shows statistically-significant differences in terms of the perceived QoE aspects between the two groups.