CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Social Virtual Reality Technology to Improve Networked Meetings

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Meetings are essential to getting things done in the workplace. Workplaces are adopting networked meetings, such as video conferencing, to save costs, support multi-location teams, and reduce pandemic health risks. Yet, video conferencing is limited in how it supports team communication and connection. This project explores building social virtual reality (VR) technology to improve networked meetings. VR shows promise as a technology for supporting meetings, in new ways, because it puts team members in a shared media space, which allows for familiar communication tactics (such as turning toward someone who is talking and gesturing with your hands). VR also allows adding helpful enhancements to meeting situations, such as changing how the room looks (from a boardroom to breakroom), and providing easy-to-use digital tools (such as anonymous voting or timers). This project will develop social VR tools to improve face-to-face meetings by helping participants balance participation, time manage, come to decisions, stick to an agenda, and achieve social connection and support for ideas. These innovations have the potential to use VR to make online meetings more effective and satisfying. To investigate how social VR technology can enhance networked meetings, this project will (1) use a research-through-design approach to iteratively conceptualize and develop novel technical social augmentations in networked VR, motivated by theories of team meetings and interpersonal communication; (2) perform controlled laboratory and more ecologically valid field studies; and (3) develop theory and implications for design of social augmentation networked meetings in VR. The team will build an extensible VR testbed to enable iterative, rapid prototyping. Thus, expected research contributions for socially augmented VR networked meetings include a testbed, prototypes, lab and field study findings regarding the efficacy of particular social augmentations, theory, and implications for design.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.