Examining Work Performance in Immersive Virtual Environments versus Face-to-Face Physical Environments through Laboratory Experimentation

With increasing proliferation of virtual environments for serious work as well as play, we are confronted by new challenges pertaining to how such environments can be leveraged to promote and induce effective work performance. In terms of organization and management, we are challenged further by decisions regarding which work activities to perform in virtual environments versus their physical counterparts; our level of understanding remains relatively primitive, and the literature remains divided. The research described in this article examines work performance in virtual versus physical environments through laboratory experimentation. We construct an immersive virtual environment, in which people interact via avatars to perform collaborative work that matches a physical environment where the same collaborative work is performed. Exercising great care to match experiment conditions and control for factors other than work environment, results elucidate important comparative performance effects and suggest compelling follow-on experiments as well as practical implications.
Presented at the International Conference on System Sciences held in Koloa, HI in January 2011.