While real museums and exhibitions have to deny access to more visitors for security reasons and to avoid overcrowding, we expect virtual museums and exhibitions to be visited by an enormous number of people in the future.

 

Such a multi-user VR creates potentially overcrowded virtual situations in which many participants simultaneously visit virtual places, either with people they know or with strangers. These users can dynamically form new socially active groups and interact with the environment and each other, but also distract each other, obscure views of virtual scenes or occupy interactive objects.

 

Multi-user VR can also allow participants to discuss and manipulate 3D models and visualizations together and collaborate on common objects, but can also cause users to disrupt the actions of others or create chaos through uncoordinated interactions.

 

At the EVA 2018 conference in Berlin Jens Reinhardt and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Katrin Wolf of Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg (HAW Hamburg, Germany) provided an overview of their work on multi-user VR and moreover highlighted how such virtual environment challenges social experience or how the occurrence of multiple users challenges the experience of content perception, for example, in a virtual exhibition.

 

Source: https://www.eva-berlin.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/EVA_2018_Konferenzband_elektronisch.pdf