Disruptions to shared mental models from poor quality of service in collaborative virtual environments

Journal article

Nicholas Milef, Adam Ryason, Di Qi, Samuel Alfred, Cullen D. Jackson, S. De
Scientific Reports, 2021

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMedCentral PubMed

Cite

APA Click to copy
Milef, N., Ryason, A., Qi, D., Alfred, S., Jackson, C. D., & De, S. (2021). Disruptions to shared mental models from poor quality of service in collaborative virtual environments. Scientific Reports.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Milef, Nicholas, Adam Ryason, Di Qi, Samuel Alfred, Cullen D. Jackson, and S. De. “Disruptions to Shared Mental Models from Poor Quality of Service in Collaborative Virtual Environments.” Scientific Reports (2021).

MLA Click to copy
Milef, Nicholas, et al. “Disruptions to Shared Mental Models from Poor Quality of Service in Collaborative Virtual Environments.” Scientific Reports, 2021.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{nicholas2021a,
  title = {Disruptions to shared mental models from poor quality of service in collaborative virtual environments},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {Scientific Reports},
  author = {Milef, Nicholas and Ryason, Adam and Qi, Di and Alfred, Samuel and Jackson, Cullen D. and De, S.}
}

Abstract

Collaborative virtual environments are being used in various applications ranging from online games to complex team training scenarios. The key to the success of such environments is the ability of the participants to form a shared mental model of the collaborative task being performed. Poor quality of service can deteriorate user performance and quality of experience, leading to a disruption of this mental model. While the effects of quality of service have been analyzed for traditional desktop environments, these effects remain unclear in collaborative virtual environments during user-to-user interactions. Here, we analyze the role of latency and packet bursts, two common problems in collaborative applications, on both simulator perception and actual task performance in a collaborative fire-fighting simulator. This exploratory study indicates that large latencies have a significant (p < 0.05) impact on the quality of experience, but not task performance. In contrast, packet bursts have a much larger impact on both the quality of experience and performance. Additionally, the network role, such as whether a user is a client or server, showed a significant (p < 0.05) impact on task performance in conditions impaired by packet bursts.