The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend towards remote collaboration at work. While many people start to return to physical workspaces, and with general travel restrictions, concerns about the environment, and budget cuts, a push for at least some remote collaboration remains ongoing. Despite the growth of virtual reality conferencing, however, the Installations for Virtual Conferencing (IVCs) in which these conferences take place often remain geared towards information exchange, and not yet as a way of developing meaningful social engagement.
Now, researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Stanford University, University of Lausanne, University of Pennsylvania, University College Dublin and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, believe that a human-friendly design approach to these environments, that understands and caters for the social element of these spaces, could allow for sustained productivity as well as sociability in the long-term.
The paper, published in ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), follows a five-week virtual reality conference - Stanford University’s annual mediaX Global Innovation Leadership Program (GILP) - with leaders from academia and industry across four continents. The participants, who joined using avatars, were introduced to a new 3D virtual environment, designed to enhance collaboration and content sharing, but with shortcomings when it came to facilitating social exchange.
The researchers applied Activity theory and Installation theory, theories taught at LSE by social psychologist Professor Saadi Lahlou, to this virtual environment to understand the different structures and affordances that shape experiences, with recommendations about how they could be redesigned and therefore improved.
They set out eight lessons to help steer how these environments could be designed to create a culture that allows for both content sharing and social exchange, including educating organisers to understand the online/offline experiences of users, and providing a clear set of rules and etiquette or ‘VRtiquette’ that will develop these spaces. For example, how to initiate and terminate interaction between avatars, new forms of augmented face work, conventions for politeness, networking etc.
Dr Maxi Heitmayer comments:
“Virtual Reality environments, unlike other forms of remote collaboration (such as videoconferences or conference calls), create a sense of ‘being there’ together in the same space. It seems a minor difference but turns out to change everything regarding participation and community building. You can believe, and say, “I was there” “I was part of it”, “We met”. We therefore believe that IVCs (Installations for Virtual Conferencing) will soon become a major set-up for collaborative work.”
While a path to understanding and designing these spaces has been shown, the authors note that these provide only the first steps.
Professor Saadi Lahlou said:
“This field is in its infancy, but it is growing very, very, fast. If we want to avoid the same type of ‘teen-age’ crisis that we observe in social media, psychologists, social scientists, and designers should start working together now. Because, while these environments are physically virtual, what happens there is socially real and has real consequences.”
Behind the story:
Read ‘Are we ‘Beyond being there’ yet?: Towards better interweaving epistemic and social aspects of virtual reality conferencing’ via the Association for Computing Machinery website: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411763.3451579