Finally a Case for Collaborative VR?: The Need to Design for Remote Multi-Party Conversations
This addresses the need for better remote communication tools for people working from home, but it is incremental as it focuses on design improvements rather than a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of designing VR for effective remote multi-party conversations by identifying three key barriers: variability of social immersion, unclear user roles, and the need for effective shared visual reference, and proposes design considerations for a future collaborative framework.
Amid current social distancing measures requiring people to work from home, there has been renewed interest on how to effectively converse and collaborate remotely utilizing currently available technologies. On the surface, VR provides a perfect platform for effective remote communication. It can transfer contextual and environmental cues and facilitate a shared perspective while also allowing people to be virtually co-located. Yet we argue that currently VR is not adequately designed for such a communicative purpose. In this paper, we outline three key barriers to using VR for conversational activity : (1) variability of social immersion, (2) unclear user roles, and (3) the need for effective shared visual reference. Based on this outline, key design topics are discussed through a user experience design perspective for considerations in a future collaborative design framework.