Mixed Reality for Collaborative Learning and Collaborative Problems Solving Environment

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Mixed Reality for Collaborative Learning and Collaborative Problems 
Solving Environment"

by

Mr. Santawat THANYADIT


Abstract:

People rely on workspace awareness to collaborate with one another, especially 
in learning and problem-solving tasks. Workspace awareness is defined as an 
understanding of a current state of the work environment and collaborators' 
activities. However, workspace awareness is difficult to maintain in virtual 
environments, since some information from the real world is missing. 
Fortunately, virtual environments are flexible and can be designed to 
compensate for a lack of real world cues. This thesis proposal aims to improve 
collaborative workspace awareness through enhancing the design of virtual 
environments. Our proposed approaches improve workspace awareness in three 
ways. The first aims to examine space configurations that could improve 
awareness in a collaboration. The second explores different strategies for 
updating the visual environment so that users are aware of their collaborators' 
actions. The third goal is to find visual cues that raise the user's awareness 
when collaborating with multiple users.

Prior research studies suggested that users operate in workspace to manage 
their attention and divide their tasks when working in the real world. The 
space within the users' reach is often assigned as a private space and the 
space out of users' reach is assigned as a group space. Following this 
approach, we propose to set up a virtual space in a desktop virtual reality 
environment by assigning the space in front of the desktop screen as a private 
space and the space behind the screen as a group space. According to our user 
study, this setup improves collaborations between users.

To gain further insight into information sharing strategies in virtual 
environments, a user study was conducted to compare different strategies for 
updating the virtual environments in complex remote problem-solving tasks. From 
the study, real-time updating is found to be not suitable for workspace 
awareness, especially when users are performing different tasks. On the other 
hand, an updating strategy that updates only information that is relevant to 
the users' actions performs the best. Moreover, users change collaboration 
strategies depending on the update timing. A design guideline is proposed from 
the user study as a direction for different collaborative situations.

While there are many research works that allow users to work together in 
one-to-one collaborations, less attention has been paid to one-to-many 
collaborations. This is due to the lack of visual awareness cues that allow 
users to spectate multiple users. To alleviate this limitation, a prototype 
system named ObserVAR is proposed. ObserVAR utilizes Augmented Reality (AR) 
technology to help an instructor in spectating multiple Virtual Reality (VR) 
users by augmenting the instructor's environment with virtual awareness cues 
generated from the VR users. In the development of ObserVAR, different 
awareness cues are compared in a user study to determine its suitability under 
various circumstances. The virtual awareness cues are then optimized further 
using techniques derived from graph visualization to reduce visual clutter.

Finally, the knowledge gained from improving workspace awareness with different 
approaches is integrated into a collaborative framework for learning and 
problem-solving tasks. The contributions of this thesis include an enhanced 
design of desktop virtual reality for collaborations; multiple improvements in 
workspace awareness across different aspects; the design and development of the 
ObserVAR system for one-to-many collaborations; and a collaborative framework 
that utilizes the proposed designs. This thesis explores various enhancements 
of virtual environments to improve workspace awareness, which leads to a better 
performance in collaborative learning and problem-solving tasks. The virtual 
environment designs in this thesis can be used as a guideline for future 
collaborative systems.


Date:			Monday, 18 March 2019

Time:                  	3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 2408
                         (lifts 17/18)

Committee Members:	Prof. Tin-Chuen Pong (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Huamin Qu (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma
 			Prof. Ajay Joneja (IEDA)


**** ALL are Welcome ****