| Description |
The proposed research aims to advance our understanding of virtual teamwork in 3D collaborative virtual environments (CVE) that have gained increasing importance in global organizations and higher education institutions, and are subject to an emerging interdisciplinary field of research. CVE have been developed to facilitate cross-border collaboration and to overcome the issues associated with traditional collaboration tools. Team members are embodied as avatars, communicate via chat and audio channels, and can jointly look at and manipulate objects in a shared virtual space. However, it is still unclear whether the findings obtained in traditional small group research and earlier virtual team studies can be applied to embodied collaboration in CVE. Our goal is to investigate group interaction processes and outcomes in physical and virtual environments in order to examine how different media affect group behavior and under what conditions which medium is most effective. We use a mixed-method approach combining behavioral observation and self-report data, and develop an innovative methodology that makes it possible to automatically and unobtrusively collect data on group behavior in CVE interactions. The proposed research integrates findings from a large-scale international field study and experimental laboratory studies. While the field study focuses on cross-cultural aspects of collaboration in CVE, observation of long-term group interactions and project work, the experimental studies are designed as a media comparison using different task types and short-term observation of ad-hoc groups. Several interrelated research objectives are formulated for a systematical investigation of behavioral patterns and psychological effects that emerge from group interactions in virtual and physical environments. The fellowship would be undertaken at the IDC Herzliya in Israel as it provides the ideal environment for the applicant to meet her research and training objectives.
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