Problem Description

With the advent of LLMs employees are more and more supported by digital agents in their daily work. This becomes particularly interesting in virtual reality (VR) working setups where colleagues meet up in 3D worlds. Then, LLMs can be embodied in form of avatars. Humans are used to solving conflicts and solving problems through discussions in situations with other human colleagues but what effect does the integration of a fully digital assistant have on problem solving in working scenarios?

Goal of the Thesis

Part of this work is to develop a study design for an experiment with a specific task for a collaborative scenario in VR. The task should be about two employees and one computer assistant being together in a virtual space to solve a task together. The exact task that the team has to solve in the working context must also be designed and formulated as part of the seminar (e.g. a financial portfolio task, an optimization task in logistics, a hiring decision by employees or similar). Independent variables can be about the appearance of the avatar but foremost manipulating the degree of consensus and disagreement between the three parties (two humans and one digital agent) is the focus. One could use the self-determination theory as a lens to formulate hypotheses about what happens with respect to autonomy, competence and relatedness in this setup. Part of the thesis is finding out which existing VR software is suitable as a platform here (e.g. Spatial) and implement the task to be carried out there. No programming knowledge is required for this. 

Requirements

• Familiarity with experimental research
• Motivation to model a 3D environment and get familiar with VR equipment

Sources

• Mütterlein, J., Jelsch, S., & Hess, T. (2018). Specifics of collaboration in virtual reality: how immersion drives the intention to collaborate. In Proceedings of the 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2018), Yokohama, Japan, June 26-30.
• Pidel, C., & Ackermann, P. (2020). Collaboration in virtual and augmented reality: a systematic overview. In International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics (pp. 141-156). Springer, Cham.
• Pouliquen-Lardy, L., Milleville-Pennel, I., Guillaume, F., & Mars, F. (2016). Remote collaboration in virtual reality: asymmetrical effects of task distribution on spatial processing and mental workload. Virtual Reality, 20(4), 213-220.
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American psychologist, 55(1), 68.
• Williamson, J., Li, J., Vinayagamoorthy, V., Shamma, D. A., & Cesar, P. (2021, May). Proxemics and social interactions in an instrumented virtual reality workshop. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).