Investigating the effect of network latency on users' performance in Collaborative Virtual Environments using navigation aids

Abstract

Serious games play a pivotal role in engaging users in activities which are considered less-engaging but healthy. Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), one of the enablers of serious games are used in various fields including education, healthcare, tele-conferencing and assembly tasks. There are different factors that affect user performance in CVE. These factors include network latency, loose coordination, lack of task distributions strategy and lack of awareness. As compared to other factors,network latency has unfortunately got less attention of the researcher and therefore, it sometimes becomes a bottleneck for the user performance in CVE. In this paper, we analyzed the effect of network latency on user performance in CVE with textual, audio, 3D Map-Liner (3DML) and arrows-casting aids on different participants. Based on task distribution model, a simulated environment for collaborative assembly task was developed to conduct the experiments. The experiments were performed on users with textual, audio, 3DML and arrows-casting aids with five level of latency (i.e. 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200 ms) to evaluate 19 groups(two participants per group) to check their performance in terms of network latency. Overall, results showed that the user's performance was better in arrows-casting based navigation as compared to other navigation aids (i.e textual, audio and 3DML) using five level of latency (i.e 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200 ms). Whenever the value of latency was increased the task completion time increased significantly with slight decrease in errors rate. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.