Effects of 2D Online and 3D Virtual World Meeting Spaces on the Performance of a Concept Selection Task by Engineering Design Teams

Abstract

This research investigates engineering design teams’ performance of a concept selection task in three meeting spaces: face-to-face, 2D online and 3D virtual world. Cisco Systems’ WebEx and Sun Microsystems’ Wonderland were used as the 2D online meeting space and the 3D virtual world, respectively. Twenty-four two-person design teams were formed and randomly assigned to one of the three meeting spaces. The teams performed a cell-phone concept selection task in the meeting space to which they were assigned. Four dependent variables were measured: task completion time, team satisfaction, self-evaluated process quality and expert-evaluated process quality. Following data collection, one-way ANOVA was used to analyze each variable to determine the differences, if any, among the meeting spaces. ANOVA results did not support rejection of the null hypothesis for any variable. These results suggest that 3D virtual worlds support design concept selection as well as 2D online meeting spaces and that both of these technologies are viable alternatives to co-located meetings when it is difficult or expensive to bring team members together for a co-located meeting.