"A-Maze-ing Arguments in Virtual Reality"

Abstract

Background
Virtual Reality is an increasingly hot topic these days. As a user, you can play more and more high-quality games and strides are being made to use this medium for education and new kinds of workspaces. Previous research on Virtual Reality shows that it could improve teamwork by letting users share information easier. Users in Virtual Reality can communicate in ways exclusive to the medium, like highlighting exact locations, so this paper analyzed how effective verbal communication is in this situation.

Methods
To analyze how Virtual Reality influences group interaction, an experiment was set up that ascertained in the presence and absence of visualizations of user actions whether a group being more aware influences how they communicate in Virtual Reality. To approach this, this paper used a maze in Virtual Reality where participants need to communicate hints of their color.

Results
The data encoding of the experiment showed that when a group's Shared Situational Awareness decreased between sessions, their level of Social Modes of Co-Construction did as well to a similar degree. When the awareness remained around the same level, only decreasing slightly, the level of social modes remained as well, going slightly up or down depending on the reading of the data.

Conclusions
From the research experiment, this paper observes there is a positive correlation between group Shared Situational Awareness and their Social Modes of Co-Construction.
Because of limited time and data sources, it is suggested that this experiment is reproduced over a longer period on a larger scale to support these findings.