Effect of View Sharing on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in Remote Collaboration

Spatial referencing is one of the important tasks in remote collaboration; for example, a person asks other collaborators to move to a specific location or pick up an object in a specific location. To achieve successful spatial referencing, one of the key points is that collaborators should obtain spatial knowledge and shared spatial knowledge about the environment. We selected the view-sharing method, which is one approach to support collaborators in understanding each other’s spatial frame-of-reference, and we investigated the effect of view-sharing on spatial knowledge and shared spatial knowledge acquisition in remote collaboration. A maze exploration experiment was conducted. Participants were asked to explore the maze collaboratively with/without view-sharing. Later, to examine the participants’ acquired graph knowledge, survey knowledge, and shared survey knowledge, the participants were asked to individually plan routes to move from objects to objects in the maze and draw the maze. The result showed that sharing collaborators’ viewpoints improved collaborators’ spatial knowledge acquisition.