Refining personal and social presence in virtual meetings (original) (raw)
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Being Social in VR Meetings: A Landscape Analysis of Current Tools
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
In the 21st century workplace (especially in COVID times), much human social interaction occurs during virtual meetings. Unlike traditional screen-based remote meetings, VR meetings promise a more richly embodied form of communication. This paper maps the experiential terrain of seven commercial VR meeting applications, with a particular focus on the range of shared social experiences and collaborative abilities these applications may enable or constrain. We examine a range of applications including Spatial, Glue VR, MeetinVR, Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room. We analyze and map avatar system strategies, meeting environments and in-world cues, meeting invitation model, and diferent models This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
During the Covid-19 pandemic, online meetings became common for daily teamwork in the home office. To understand the opportunities and challenges of meeting in virtual reality (VR) compared to videoconferences, we conducted the weekly team meetings of our human-computer interaction research lab on five off-the-shelf online meeting platforms over four months. After each of the 12 meetings, we asked the participants (N = 32) to share their experiences, resulting in 200 completed online questionnaires. We evaluated the ratings of the overall meeting experience and conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the quantitative data to compare VR meetings and video calls in terms of meeting involvement and co-presence. In addition, a thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed genuine insights covering five themes: spatial aspects, meeting atmosphere, expression of emotions, meeting productivity, and user needs. We reflect on our findings gained under authentic working conditions, derive lessons learned for running successful team meetings in VR supporting different kinds of meeting formats, and discuss the team's long-term platform choice.
Avatars meet meetings: design issues in integrating avatars in distributed corporate meetings
2010
The difficulties remote participants of distributed meetings face are widely recognized. In this paper we describe the design of an avatar-based e-meeting support tool named Olympus, which aims to ameliorate some of the challenges remote participants face in distributed meetings. Olympus provides a customizable peripheral display on the bottom of existing e-meeting solutions. An initial observational study was conducted of the use of Olympus in 6 meetings, three each of a status meeting and a presentation meeting. By illustrating how avatars were used in the two meeting types, we hope to surface design issues and refine our understanding of how avatars may be useful in the design of online meeting spaces.
International Journal of Research in E-learning, 2023
New technologies and societal shifts are profoundly influencing communication and conducting meetings. Over the past few years, the number of online conferences has increased. The body of literature indicates that online events allow for cost and social inequalities reduction. Despite this, they also present challenges in non-verbal communication, and diminish the sense of co-presence, thus affecting networking. Current academic discussions on the advantages and limitations of organizing remote academic conferences are typically confined to those conducted via video-conferencing systems. The aim of this research is to explore the potential of virtual reality (VR) technology and social VR platforms as alternative methods for organizing online academic conferences. The authors present the course of one of the first academic conference conducted entirely in social VR (Wirtualium 2.0), along with the survey outcomes regarding the potential of this environment for hosting academic conferences. Our findings indicate that, compared to video-conferencing systems, social VR platforms offer for most participants a higher sense of co-presence, facilitating networking and engagement in informal conversations. In this context, the identified limitations of social VR platforms encompass limited device accessibility, technical challenges, and impediments to efficient note-taking. Nonetheless, the majority of users consider social VR as suitable for hosting academic conferences. This suggests that even though academic events via social VR platforms encounter technical challenges and will not be the same as in-person conferences, they should exploit the potential of VR technology to achieve what is unattainable in a physical setting.
Enhancing distributed corporate meetings with lightweight avatars
2010
The difficulties remote participants of distributed meetings face are widely recognized. In this paper we describe the design of an avatar-based e-meeting support tool named Olympus, which aims to ameliorate some of the challenges remote participants face in distributed meetings. Olympus provides a customizable peripheral display on the bottom of existing e-meeting solutions. An initial observational study was conducted of the use of Olympus in 6 meetings, three each of a status meeting and a presentation meeting. Avatars fostered team bonding through social play during status meetings, while minimalist dots allowed focused attention during presentation meetings.
Whether businesses will make use of virtual worlds for meetings, training, and events is not just an academic question. Use of existing and newly developed virtual worlds is expected to grow for the near future. International companies are entering a variety of virtual worlds to promote collaboration among their geographically dispersed workforce for training and meetings, as well as for business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications with internal and external audiences. These worlds provide engaging experiences that can be enjoyable and memorable. This article addresses opportunities and challenges in conducting meetings in virtual worlds. It covers the evolution of technology for virtual meetings, a theoretical analysis of technology acceptance, case studies on organizations utilizing virtual worlds, and practical considerations for conducting virtual meetings and events.
Getting into the Meeting-Feeling: An Explorative Analysis of Presence in Videoconferencing
People working at different locations still choose to meet face-to-face despite the availability of videoconferencing technology. A plausible explanation is the lack of social and physical presence – the feeling of being together inside a meeting space. After reviewing literature on presence, a multidisciplinary team first developed a mockup, followed by a prototype of an innovative videoconferencing system consisting of: (1) a Virtual Meeting Room displaying all participants as avatars and (2) video streams of all participants. By conducting focus groups and expert reviews, we evaluated which elements affected the sense of presence. Also, we argue that presence in formal videoconferencing meetings is not always necessary depending on various factors, such as the relevancy of the meeting topic to a participant.
Toward VR in VR: Assessing Engagement and Social Interaction in a Virtual Conference
IEEE Access, 2023
The pandemic brought about an unprecedented number of virtual conferences, given the heavy restrictions on travel to in-person meetings. Despite all the advances in technology, people still complain about virtual events. There is Zoom fatigue, confinement malaise, and a longing for personal social interactions. This paper discusses our experience organizing the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (IEEE VR) as a virtual event. IEEE VR was a success with 1200+ registered paying participants, dozens of workshops and tutorials, and hundreds of technical papers. We used (1) a virtual environment platform, together with (2) discussion tools and (3) videoconferencing/broadcast/online tools to further provide effective social interaction and increase engagement. In this paper, we explore the synergies between virtual environments and other online tools and assess user engagement by analyzing the messages exchanged between participants across different genders and geographical regions. To this end, we apply diverse engagement metrics for online conferences. Our analysis shows that these metrics have the potential to highlight engagement, diversity, and inclusion by combining textual messages, participant geographic and gender information, communities of participants, and visitation patterns in a virtual environment. Drawing on our results and experiences, we propose guidelines for organizing technical virtual events to increase diversity and social interaction. INDEX TERMS Virtual reality, virtual conferences, virtual environments, Virbela/iLRN, data analytics, guidelines, recommendations.
Public speaking in virtual reality: Facing an audience of avatars
Computer Graphics and …, 1999
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately. W hat happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer generated-to an audience of avatars? If the virtual audience seems attentive, well-behaved, and interested, if they show positive facial expressions with complimentary actions such as clapping and nodding, does the speaker infer correspondingly positive evaluations of performance and show fewer signs of anxiety? On the other hand, if the audience seems hostile, disinterested, and visibly bored, if they have negative facial expressions and exhibit reactions such as head-shaking, loud yawning, turning away, falling asleep, and walking out, does the speaker infer correspondingly negative evaluations of performance and show more signs of anxiety? We set out to study this question during the summer of 1998. We designed a virtual public speaking scenario, followed by an experimental study.
Engagement and Quality of Experience in Remote Business Meetings
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Interactive eXtended Reality
Currently, most videoconferencing technologies do not keep employees sufficiently engaged during business meetings. Recent studies have shown how extended reality (XR) technologies can help in executing remote meetings in new and possibly better ways. One important factor for meetings in e.g. Virtual Reality (VR) is avatar realism, with the assumption that photorealistic representations of users increase the engagement during meetings compared to a model-based graphical representation. However, so far only limited studies have been conducted in a real-world setting with a social virtual reality communication system in which users are represented as photorealistic avatars. Therefore, in this paper, we present a pilot study using a social VR communication system that allows employees of an organisation to meet each other from different remote office locations in The Netherlands. The users are captured with a depth camera, after which the capture is rendered in the HMD's of the users. Furthermore, the research provides a novel way to subjectively investigate the engagement and quality of experience (QoE) in social VR in real-world settings and long-term use. Our correlation analysis shows that there are strong linear relationships