Lars Bråthe

Presence, creativity and collaborative work in virtual environments

Research has identified many different concepts and factors, e.g. immersiveness, presence, performance, interaction, and defined a large number of guidelines that contribute to developing advanced virtual environments (VEs). By reviewing research on differences between individual work and group work, and how it is influenced by these factors, this paper aims to improve understanding of networked collaboration. Allowing creativity is considered to promote higher quality of work in general. The paper examines the impact of creativity on work in VEs, with focus on understanding the relationship between presence and creativity in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). It is found that important prerequisites for successful outcomes are balance between presence and copresence and providing enough time and space for individual contributions.

Supporting communication within industrial doctoral projects: the thesis steering model

This study presents the Thesis Steering Model (TSM), an instrument supporting systematic communication and collaboration between the different stakeholders involved in industrial doctoral projects. The results describe TSM and illustrate its introduction for seven doctoral projects within a postgraduate school in applied informatics. The experiences from the first two years in use are: enhanced communication, mutual understanding of academic and business values, and opportunity to the doctoral students to build a research identity associated to their own project.

Understanding Group Work in Virtual Environments: Performance, Creativity, and Presence

Virtual environments (VEs) have the following dimensions: content, geometry and dynamics. Experiences in VEs refer much to the sensory experience produced by a computer technology that often is a ‘sense of physical reality ... a construction from the symbolic, geometric, and dynamic [computer generated] information directly presented to our senses’ (Ellis 1995, p. 16). In a VE the following aspects are also important: user-involvement, direct interactivity, the possibility to elaborate a sense of being in the three-dimensional computergenerated space, and to receive direct responses from the environment so that the participants experience a control on their actions.