Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA.
Center for Modeling, Simulation, and Imaging in Medicine, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, 12180, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Dec 7;11(1):23556. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-02567-7.
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.
协作式虚拟环境正在被应用于各种领域，从在线游戏到复杂的团队训练场景。这类环境成功的关键在于参与者能够形成对所执行协作任务的共同心理模型。服务质量差会降低用户的表现和体验质量，导致这种心理模型的中断。虽然已经针对传统桌面环境分析了服务质量的影响，但在用户间交互的协作式虚拟环境中，这些影响仍不清楚。在这里，我们分析了延迟和数据包突发这两个协作应用中的常见问题，对协作式灭火模拟器中的模拟器感知和实际任务性能的影响。这项探索性研究表明，较大的延迟对体验质量有显著影响（p < 0.05），但对任务性能没有影响。相比之下，数据包突发对体验质量和性能都有更大的影响。此外，在受到数据包突发影响的条件下，网络角色（例如用户是客户端还是服务器）对任务性能有显著影响（p < 0.05）。
