The effect of interpersonal familiarity on cooperation in a virtual environment

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) allow people to experience situations which because of danger, expense, time, or distance would not otherwise be available. Moreover, IVEs have been shown to be useful tools for learning and training. However, there are still many unanswered questions about how humans experience and interact with these environments and how this experience differs from the real world. In the experiment presented in this work, we are specifically interested in how effectively two people will collaborate within an environment given that they have never met or even seen each other prior to the experiment. We postulate that participants who never meet their partner in a collaborative environment will perform worse than those who are able to interact with their partner prior to the performance of a task. If this holds true, then it could have important implications for long distance collaboration.