Communication in Immersive Social Virtual Reality A Systematic Review of 10 Years Studies_2

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Communication in Immersive Social Virtual Reality: A

Systematic Review of 10 Years’ Studies

Xiaoying Wei∗

The Hong Kong University of Science

and Technology

Hong Kong SAR, China

xweias@connect.ust.hk

Xiaofu Jin∗

The Hong Kong University of Science

and Technology

Hong Kong SAR, China

xjinao@connect.ust.hk

Mingming Fan†

The Hong Kong University of Science

and Technology (Guangzhou)

Guangzhou, China

The Hong Kong University of Science

and Technology

Hong Kong SAR, China

mingmingfan@ust.hk

ABSTRACT

As virtual reality (VR) technologies have improved in the past

decade, more research has investigated how they could support

more eective communication in various contexts to improve col-

laboration and social connectedness. However, there was no liter-

ature to summarize the uniqueness VR provided and put forward

guidance for designing social VR applications for better commu-

nication. To understand how VR has been designed and used to

facilitate communication in dierent contexts, we conducted a sys-

tematic review of the studies investigating communication in social

VR in the past ten years by following the PRISMA guidelines. We

highlight current practices and challenges and identify research

opportunities to improve the design of social VR to better support

communication and make social VR more accessible.

CCS CONCEPTS

•Human-centered computing →

HCI theory, concepts, and mod-

els.

KEYWORDS

Virtual Reality, Social VR, Communication, Evaluation

ACM Reference Format:

Xiaoying Wei, Xiaofu Jin, and Mingming Fan. 2022. Communication in Im-

mersive Social Virtual Reality: A Systematic Review of 10 Years’ Studies. In

Chinese CHI ’22: The Tenth International Symposium of Chinese CHI (Chinese

CHI 2022), October 22–October 23, 2022, Guangzhou, China. ACM, New York,

NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456

1 INTRODUCTION

Communication is dened as the transmission of resources, such as

knowledge, data, and skills, among dierent parties using shared

∗Both authors contributed equally to this research.

†Corresponding Author

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed

for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation

on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM

must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,

to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a

fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

Chinese CHI ’22, October 23–October 26, 2022, Guangzhou, China

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06. . . $15.00

https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456

symbols and media [

]. Ecient communication is an essential

demand which would impact work eciency and user experiences

in contexts such as collaboration [

], social contact [

], meeting

[

], education [

], and gaming [

]. Recently, with the outbreak

of COVID-19, the need for remote communication has increased

dramatically [

]. The current mainstream technology

for remote communication is video conferencing systems such as

Zoom and Skype. However, these types of communication media

do not provide an immersive environment as face-to-face does. As a

result, they do not provide users with the feeling of bodily closeness,

emotional closeness, and the experiences of physical presence. They

also limit users’ interaction with the environment and objects, such

as visiting museums or traveling together [22].

Virtual reality (VR) refers to a process of mental transcendence

into synthetic, three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments with

the use of immersive technologies [

]. The concept of a vir-

tual environment facilitating communication has been suggested

and analyzed in the 1990s [

]. With the immersive environment

and the representation of the avatar, VR can provide users with

real-time and embodied interactions that are similar to face-to-

face communication rather than merely looking at a computer

screen. It also aords a broader spectrum of communication modes

including both verbal and non-verbal interactions such as voice,

gestures, proximity, facial expression and haptic feedback. Multiple

users can interact with one another via VR head-mounted displays

(HMDs), which is known as social VR. In the past decade, booming

commercial social VR applications such as Facebook Spaces, VR

Chat, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room have led to an emerging research

agenda on social VR in HCI and CSCW, drawing research attention

to new research questions, especially in communication in social

VR environments [1, 3, 31, 53].

Although there are various applications of social VR, the core of

social VR is to provide communication between people as a bridge.

Prior research explored communication in social VR in dierent

aspects such as the types of non-verbal cues [

], compared with

video conferencing tools [

]. While informative, there still lacks a

holistic understanding of how communication has been studied in

immersive social VR. This has motivated us to conduct a systematic

literature review to better understand what has been studied in the

past decades of literature regarding communication in social VR and

to highlight the design opportunities for future work. Specically,

we aim to answer the following two research questions:

arXiv:2210.01365v1 [cs.HC] 4 Oct 2022

Chinese CHI ’22, October 23–October 26, 2022, Guangzhou, China Wei, Jin and Fan

(1)

RQ1: What factors in social VR aect users’ communication

quality? What are the dierences between social VR and

other forms of media for communication?

(2)

RQ2: What methods are used to evaluate communication

quality in social VR?

We conducted a systematic review using the widely adopted

PRISMA method [

] to investigate communication in social VR.

We focused on the relevant papers published in major human-

computer interaction venues (e.g., CHI, TOCHI, UIST, VR, TVCG,

DIS) in the past ten years (2012-2022), when VR-related research

has gained increasing attention from both academia and industry.

By answering the two RQs through this literature review, we make

the following two contributions.

(1)

We identied the factors that aect people’s communica-

tion quality in social VR, including the sense of anonymity

brought by the avatar, a diverse set of approaches to express-

ing information including natural expressions and actions

with the representation by the avatar.

(2)

We investigated the methods used to study communication

in social VR in the reviewed papers and identied research

opportunities to better support communication and make

it more accessible in social VR. We propose future research

directions according to the results of our review, such as

using social VR as communication media for remote family

relatives.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK

2.1 Social VR

Social VR refers to the applications (apps) which enable people

to interact with each other through virtual environments via VR

head-mounted displays (HMDs) [

]. Recently, commercial social

VR applications attracted many users to interact with one another,

such as VRChat, Rec Room, AltspaceVR, High Fidelity, Facebook

Spaces, and so on. Previous research has explored the design guide-

lines and user experiences in these commercial social VR apps

[

]. In addition to commercial social VR apps, researchers have

also explored social VR in dierent aspects. For example, prior

research investigated collaborative virtual environments (CVEs)

[

], ethnographies of virtual worlds [

], and related ac-

counts of social activity in virtual environments [

]. No

matter how various applications of social VR is, the core of social

VR is to provide communication between people as a bridge. In this

paper, we focus on exploring communication in social VR.

2.2 Communication in social VR

Communication is an interactive process through which partici-

pants mutually exchange and interpret verbal and nonverbal mes-

sages [

]. Communication is important, acting as a strong need and

desire for people with their distant family and friends. [

Moreover, good communication helps people build trust, make good

relationships with one another, solve problems and handle conicts

[

]. To facilitate communication, social media apps such as Zoom

and Facebook are widely used around the world, enabling people

to experience remote communication using text, audio, or video.

However, these types of communication media do not provide

an immersive communication environment compared with face-

to-face communication, making people feel less present and lack

bodily closeness, emotional closeness, as well as opportunities to

interact with the physical environment and objects together [

With VR, an emerging alternative, users are able to "meet" in a

shared, immersive virtual environment and interact with virtual

representations of each other, thus bringing a better communication

experiences [

]. Researchers have already explored commu-

nication in social VR. Maloney et al. explored the types of non-

verbal interactions used naturally in social VR and participants’

perceptions of non-verbal communication as well as the resulting

interaction outcome, then highlighted potential design implications

that aim at better supporting non-verbal communication in social

VR [

]. Abdullah’s work compared people’s behavioral patterns

across the VR and videoconference [

], and observed signicant

behavioral dierences. Although informative, there is no literature

to summarize what capabilities VR provides to make users’ com-

munication in VR dierent from other media. In addition, there is

no summarization of how researchers measure the communication

eect and user experiences in dierent contexts in social VR, which

makes it hard for researchers to refer to. Therefore, we conducted

a systematic literature review to address this gap, which can help

researchers and designers to design more meaningful and practical

VR applications for communication.

3 METHOD

We conducted the systematic literature review following the PRISMA

method [

]. PRISMA is a widely used method to ensure the repro-

ducibility of the literature review in many disciplines, including

human-computer interaction [

]. The PRISMA method con-

tains four phases to identify eligible papers. Figure 1 shows the

details of the four phases in our research. The following section

explains how we conducted each phase in detail.

3.1 Identication

We chose ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Springer as our

targeted databases because these databases publish immersive VR-

related papers from signicant HCI conferences and journals (e.g.,

CHI, TOCHI, UIST, VR, TVCG, DIS). We also conducted a supple-

mentary search using the relevant keywords in Google Scholar to

avoid omissions.

Table 1 shows our search query in three databases. Taking the

search query of ACM Digital Library as an example, to understand

how users communicate in social VR, we included ’communicat*

and (virtual or VR)’ in our search query and allowed them to appear

anywhere in the title or the abstract, and allowed ’social’ to appear

anywhere in the full text.

We used ’communicat*’ to represent variations of the word "com-

munication" such as communicate and communicating. The word

’virtual’ was included as an exact search term, but we left the word

’reality’ out to include dierent forms of expressing such settings

and related technologies, interactions, user interfaces, and tech-

niques, such as ’VR’, and ’virtual environment’.

We included the papers published from the past ten years, 2012 to

2022. The results were restricted to publications written in English.

Communication in Immersive Social Virtual Reality Chinese CHI ’22, October 23–October 26, 2022, Guangzhou, China

Table 1: Boolean instructions for ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore and Springer

Database Boolean Instructions

ACM Digital Library

Title: communicat* AND (virtual OR vr) OR Abstract: communicat* AND (vir-

tual OR vr) AND Full text: social

IEEE Xplore

("Document Title": communicat* and (virtual or VR)) OR ("Abstract": communi-

cat* and (virtual or VR)) AND ("Full Text Only": social)

Springer Title: communicat * AND (virtual OR vr) AND Full text: social

Figure 1: Our literature search and inclusion phases used the

PRISMA procedure. This diagram describes the information

ow throughout the following four phases, identication,

screening, eligibility, and inclusion, and presents the num-

ber of the literature identied, included, excluded, and the

reasons for exclusions.

We chose to include only full papers because posters or adjunct

publications often cannot provide a depth evaluation of users’ com-

munication behavior. This resulted in 1058 papers: 771 from ACM

Digital Library, 246 from IEEE Xplore, 30 from Springer, and 11

from Google scholar. We compiled the titles and abstracts of these

1058 publications for screening in Phase 2.

3.2 Screening and Eligibility

We screened the title and abstract of 1058 papers in the screening

phase using the following three criteria.

(1) Communication.

The paper must report an understanding

of users’ communication behavior. Interaction techniques

such as facial reconstruction and haptic feedback can be

used to facilitate communication. We excluded papers that

do not focus on communication, such as understanding users’

preferred collaborative activities in social VR.

(2) User-to-user communication.

The paper needs to focus

on communication among users, including understanding

users’ communication behaviors in social VR or techniques

to facilitate multi-user communication. We excluded papers

that solve communication problems between a genuine user

and a virtual agent.

(3) Immersive VR.

The user studies reported in the paper must

be conducted in immersive VR environments with head-

mounted displays. For the scope of this research, we ex-

cluded studies that explored augmented and mixed reality

technologies, CAVEs, or other stereoscopic displays. We ex-

cluded papers aiming to facilitate communication between

immersive VR users and outsiders.

Out of 1058, we included 76 papers for subsequent eligibility

by screening the titles and abstracts using the inclusion criteria

presented above.

In the eligibility phase, we then excluded 44 papers. Eighteen

papers were excluded because they were not about immersive VR

with HMD. 13 papers were excluded because they did not focus

on communication between humans. Eight papers were excluded

because they were not full papers (less than four pages). Five papers

were excluded because they just mentioned communication in VR

but did not dive into this topic. This step did not exclude papers

based on the technologies used. Eventually, we included 32 papers

for our detailed analysis.

3.3 Data Set and Coding Process

In this phase, we coded these 32 papers using thematic analysis [

Two researchers rst coded a randomly selected set of ten papers

independently. The initial codebook was based on our research

questions, such as communication approaches, research methods.

Subsequently, the two researchers discussed their codes to gain a

consensus on their understanding. Finally, two researchers used

the consolidated codes to nish coding the remaining 22 papers.

We organized the codes into themes using anity diagramming,

which will be presented in the next section. We also conducted a

quantitative analysis to show the statistics of relevant study designs.

In the following two sections, we present our ndings to answer

the two research questions accordingly.

4 FINDINGS

4.1 Factors aecting communication behaviors

(RQ1)

We identied two key factors—Avatar and Non-verbal cues that

aect users’ communication behaviors in social VR. According to

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CommunicationinImmersiveSocialVirtualReality:ASystematicReviewof10Years’StudiesXiaoyingWei∗TheHongKongUniversityofScienceandTechnologyHongKongSAR,Chinaxweias@connect.ust.hkXiaofuJin∗TheHongKongUniversityofScienceandTechnologyHongKongSAR,Chinaxjinao@connect.ust.hkMingmingFan†TheHongKongUniversityofSc...

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