Collaborating remotely: an evaluation of immersive capabilities on spatial experiences and team membership

ABSTRACT

Today’s workforce environments are steadily becoming more distributed across the globe, calling for improved ways of facilitating collaborations at a distance, including geo-collaborations or collaborations at critical locations. Newer technology is allowing distributed teams to move away from traditional conference rooms, taking collaborations into the field and giving remote teams more information about the environment. This idea of situating a remote collaborator’s experiences in the field, virtually, promises to enhance the understanding of geographically remote spaces. Newer technologies in virtual reality (VR) hold promise for providing mobile spatial experiences in real-time, without being tied to fixed hardware, such as systems in conference rooms. An exploratory study using VR technology on remote user experiences in a collaboration was conducted to identify the added value for remote collaborators. The findings suggest immersive capabilities improve feelings of presence in the remote locations and perceptions of being in the remote location increase feelings of team membership.

KEYWORDS:

• Presence
• geo-collaboration
• virtual reality

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Yooinn Hong and Xi Liu for participating in this study as moderators.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Logistics Management Institute (LMI) Research Institute through a grant [grant number EM160045] to study VR for Distributed Workforces.