The Users’ Avatars Nonverbal Interaction in Collaborative Virtual Environments for Learning - Virtual Reality and Environments - page 78

The avatars' head is another entity that can take four positions to change the user field of
view; to the front where the other two peers can be seen, to the right or left to see directly
one of the peers, or down to see the workspace -see Figure 3, for that the arrow keys are
used.
Fig. 3. The avatar head movements
And, when the user is speaking a dialogue globe appears near his/her right hand as showed
in Figure 4., when the user wants to speak he/she needs to press the spacebar key.
This first trial was conducted with the aim of modeling a virtual tutor to facilitate
collaboration. In the next session, the tutor implementation is discussed.
Fig. 4. The dialogue globe
3.1.1 Method
Subjects . Fifteen undergraduate students, 14 males and 1 female from the Informatics School
at the Universidad de Guadalajara were invited to participate. Five groups of triads were
formed voluntarily.
Materials and Task . The task consisted on the re-arrange of furniture on an apartment sketch
to make room for a billiard or a ping-pong table; the group decided which one of them.
Procedure . A number of rules with punctuation were given regarding on how to place
furniture such as the required space for the playing table, spaces between furniture and