Workspace Awareness in Virtual Reality: Digital Collaboration in Architectural Design

Virtual Reality (VR) technology can benefit architectural design by providing an immer- sive and intuitive medium for collaboration, review and evaluation of the developed concepts. The early prototypes were developed which indicated that users can be startled by certain unexpected events in immersive VR environments. To ensure satis- faction with the collaboration experience, I conducted a study on Workspace Awareness (WA) during architectural collaboration in immersive VR environments. This paper presents the utility of using audio awareness in improving WA. I observed an overall positive effect of audio feedback on informing the users about changes happening in a digital shared workspace. Additionally, stereo headphones proved to be sufficient for delivering the auditory cues, especially, when combined with visual support. In conclusion, awareness is only one of the factors that has to be taken into account when considering collaboration in immersive Virtual Environments (VEs), along with interactions and user presentation. This thesis supports previous research on audio awareness and shows its utility in the explored setting.