Comparing design review outcomes in immersive and non-immersive collaborative virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) such as virtual reality (VR) technologies have great potential to support design reviews. They enable users to view a design (solution) under review and simultaneously represent team members with social cues such as avatars. However, while CVEs are promising for design practice and education, it is still unclear how they affect review outcomes. This study presents an experiment that compares 10 three-member teams during design review sessions conducted within two different CVEs. The first CVE is non-immersive, that is, a collaborative computer-aided design (CAD) tool used on a conventional desktop interface, while the second CVE is immersive and employs three head-mounted display VR headsets. The results show that teams in immersive CVE identify fewer issues than the teams in non-immersive CVE. Furthermore, although the reviewed designs exhibit a similar level of complexity, the results show that the distribution of issues in immersive CVE was slightly different than the distribution in non-immersive CVE. These results suggest that teams might perform better when using collaborative CAD than collaborative VR when the review goal is to identify as many issues as possible. However, the decision on which CVE to employ should depend on the design under review, as the two technologies might support reviews of different types of designs.