| dc.description.abstract | Virtual Environments (VEs), as media providing high-level immersion, o er
people an opportunity to mimic natural interpersonal interactions digitally. As
a multi-player version of VEs, Shared Virtual Environments (SVEs) inherit VEs'
advantages in enabling natural interactions and generating a high level of immersion,
and will possibly play an increasingly important role in supporting
digitally-mediated collaboration. Though SVEs have been extensively explored
for education, entertainment, work, and training, as yet, few SVEs exist in the
eld of supporting creative collaboration and as a result, research on the creative
aspect of collaboration in SVEs remains very poor. This raises questions about
how to design the user experience to support creative collaboration in SVEs.
This thesis starts with an introduction and related work. An SVE called Let's
Move (LeMo) will then be briefed. LeMo allows two people to interact with each
other and create music collaboratively in its virtual environment. Three studies
based on LeMo will then be presented: Study I explores how free-form visual 3D
annotations and work identity in
uence the collaboration, Study II and Study
III explore how working space con gurations a ect the collaboration. Results
indicate that: (1) 3D annotations can support people's collaborative music making
(CMM) in SVEs through ve classes of use; (2) group territory, personal
territory, and territorial behaviour emerge during collaborative music making
in SVEs; (3) manipulating characteristics of personal space a ected collaborative
behaviour, formation of territory, work e ciency, sense of contribution,
preference, and so on. Then an overall discussion between studies is made and
further implications for SVEs supporting collaborative music making (and other
types of collaboration) in SVEs are given. The ndings of this thesis contribute
towards the design of Human-Computer Interaction of Shared Virtual Environments
focusing on supporting collaborative music making. | en_US |
