The benefits of co-located collaboration and immersion on assembly modeling in virtual environments

In this paper we present a quantitative assessment of user performance in an assembly modeling application. The purpose of the evaluation is to identify the influence of immersion and collaboration on the performance in assembly and manipulation tasks in a virtual environment (VE). The environment used in this study is a projection-based system that supports 6DOF head and hand tracking for two independent users. In four experiments we compare the performance in stereoscopic and monoscopic viewing modes and in collaborative and single-user interaction modes. The user study is based on a realistic, application-oriented modeling scenario from the manufacturing industry. The task completion time is used as the performance metric. The results of this study show that collaborative interaction and stereoscopic viewing is not only preferred by users, but also have a significant effect on their performance.