Group-to-group telepresence systems immerse geographically separated groups in a shared interaction space where remote users are represented as avatars. Notably, such systems allow users to interact with collocated and remote interlocutors simultaneously. In this context, where virtual user representations can be directly compared with real users, we investigate how visual realism (avatar type) and aural realism (presence of spatial audio) affect communication. Furthermore, we examine how communication differs between collocated and remote pairs of interlocutors. In our user study, groups of four participants perform a collaborative conversation task under the aforementioned visual and aural realism conditions. Results indicate that avatar realism has positive effects on subjective ratings of perceived message understanding, togetherness, and naturalness, and yields behavioural differences that indicate more interactivity and engagement. Few significant effects of aural realism were observed. Comparisons between collocated and remote communication found that collocated communication was perceived as more effective, but that more visual attention was paid to both remote participants than the collocated user.

In collocated social virtual reality, the relative physical and virtual positions of users are often synchronised to reduce the risk of collisions between users. In this paper, we introduce a two-phase confirmation-based group navigation concept for collocated scenarios which allows users to stay behind and catch up to the group based on individual confirmation. The confirmation to catch up can be triggered by the group’s guide, the individual user or both. Ghost avatars, which visualise the physical locations of other users, are used to avoid physical collisions in situations where part of the group has already virtually navigated to a new location. We evaluate the three confirmation-based techniques in a user study (N = 24) in the context of a guided tour in a virtual museum and compare it to a baseline group navigation technique. Our findings show that users prefer having the autonomy to decide when to follow their group. Despite increased complexity, the proposed techniques achieved comparable levels of co-presence, spatial orientation, and understanding of others’ positions in both the virtual and physical environments as the baseline, effectively balancing user autonomy, navigation understanding and social experience.

Immersive recordings capture virtual reality interactions and are used in various contexts such as education and entertainment. However, there has been only limited research on requirements and techniques for editing such recordings. We interviewed expert editors of video recordings to understand their workflows, familiarised them with immersive recordings, and asked them about what editing challenges and capabilities they can envision for immersive recordings. The experts identified several functionalities they considered relevant for editing, including viewer placement, control over the viewer’s size, support for live and asynchronous collaboration, and different transition types. 

We present ISA, an Immersive Study Analyzer system designed for the comprehensive analysis of social VR studies. ISA records all user actions, speech, and the contextual environment of social VR studies. A key feature is the ability to review and analyze such immersive recordings collaboratively in VR, through support of behavioral coding and user-defined analysis queries for efficient identification of complex behavior. We make our code open source.

Keeping in social contact with friends and family and engaging in social and enjoyable activities is important for our well-being – especially for older adults, who often live distant from loved ones. We present findings from interviews with older and young adults on their needs and desires for social VR, especially regarding the types of activity they would like to engage in. We compare these findings to identify differences, commonalities, and opportunities for inter-generational social VR activities.