Where's the Team Spirit? An Exploratory Study on Team Development Through Co-located Tablet-Based VR

TL;DR

This study investigates how co-located tablet-based VR experiences can enhance teamwork skills like communication and trust through asymmetric, narrative-driven scenarios, supported by a user study and design recommendations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel VR training design that fosters teamwork skills via asymmetric, narrative-driven tasks and provides empirical insights and recommendations for immersive team training.

Findings

Users adapted dynamically with verbal exchange and role negotiation.

Active application of teamwork KSAs was observed during tasks.

Design recommendations for effective immersive team training were developed.

Abstract

We explore how narrative-driven asymmetric VR experiences can support the development of teamwork-related knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs), such as communication, coordination, trust, and reflexivity. We present the design and evaluation of a tablet-based VR training experience structured around spatial separation, tool asymmetry, and interdependent tasks that require verbal coordination. The experience was designed based on interviews with HR professionals and mapped to a framework of established KSAs. We conducted a co-located user study (N=16) that involved two consecutive collaborative scenarios. Our findings show that users adapted dynamically using verbal exchange, role negotiation, and shared representations to coordinate under asymmetric conditions. We also observed active application of teamwork KSAs. Based on our insights, we present design recommendations for creating effective immersive team training interventions.