Creation and Evaluation of a Virtual and Collaborative Playground

Focusing on the way users perform their tasks in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), there is still little research on understanding the impact of different platforms on the collaboration experience, as well as on which tasks a collaborative approach is worth using. Addressing both issues, this paper describes not only a CVE, being one that reproduces a block building game, but also an experiment aimed to evaluate the performance and the overall collaborative experience, as regards the impact that different input and output technologies employed by users and the tasks performed by them have on it. In addition, this paper also describes implementation details of the CVE that are rarely discussed in the literature, presenting an environment model that is based on the novel idea ofinteraction views.