Proxemics and Social Interactions in an Instrumented Virtual Reality Workshop
This work addresses the design of virtual collaborative spaces for remote work and social interaction, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to analyze a specific workshop scenario.
The researchers studied how virtual environments affect social interactions in workshops, finding that smaller rooms promoted cohesive groups while larger rooms made group formation harder but allowed more flexible personal space.
Virtual environments (VEs) can create collaborative and social spaces, which are increasingly important in the face of remote work and travel reduction. Recent advances, such as more open and widely available platforms, create new possibilities to observe and analyse interaction in VEs. Using a custom instrumented build of Mozilla Hubs to measure position and orientation, we conducted an academic workshop to facilitate a range of typical workshop activities. We analysed social interactions during a keynote, small group breakouts, and informal networking/hallway conversations. Our mixed-methods approach combined environment logging, observations, and semi-structured interviews. The results demonstrate how small and large spaces influenced group formation, shared attention, and personal space, where smaller rooms facilitated more cohesive groups while larger rooms made small group formation challenging but personal space more flexible. Beyond our findings, we show how the combination of data and insights can fuel collaborative spaces' design and deliver more effective virtual workshops.