Virtual Production (VP) professionals often face challenges accessing tacit knowledge and creative intent, which are important in forming common ground with collaborators and in contributing more effectively and efficiently to the team. From our formative study (N=23) with a follow-up interview (N=6), we identified the significance and prevalence of this challenge. To help professionals access knowledge, we present GroundLink, a Unity add-on that surfaces meeting-derived knowledge directly in the editor to support establishing common ground. It features a meeting knowledge dashboard for capturing and reviewing decisions and comments, constraint-aware feedforward that proactively informs the editor environment, and cross-modal synchronization that provides referential links between the dashboard and the editor. A comparative study (N=12) suggested that GroundLink help users build common ground with their team while improving perceived confidence and ease of editing the 3D scene. An expert evaluation with VP professionals (N=5) indicated strong potential for GroundLink in real-world workflows.
The pursuit of seamlessness in collaborative VR often creates a paradox: concealing technical failures generates asymmetric awareness, fracturing the shared reality essential for teamwork. We argue instead that disruption timing acts as an information structure. Drawing on the theory of rational rituals, we posit that a simultaneous onset creates a Public, Synchronous, Bounded (PSB) anchor that establishes common knowledge. We tested this framework with 34 triads (N = 102) performing interdependent tasks. Results show that simultaneous disruptions significantly accelerated Time-to-Recovery (TTR) and preserved role stability by enabling a compact A–R–E sequence (affect-check, reorientation, re-entry). Conversely, asynchronous onsets caused epistemic fragmentation and role churn. We contribute the coordination wrapper, a design strategy that transforms inevitable system failures into synthetic PSB cues, shifting the paradigm from error minimization to resilient recovery.
Cognitive empathy, the ability to understand others‘ perspectives, is essential for effective communication, reducing biases, and constructive negotiation. However, this skill is declining in a performance-driven society, which prioritizes efficiency over perspective-taking. Here, the training of cognitive empathy is challenging because it is a subtle, hard-to-perceive soft skill. To address this, we developed CoEmpaTeam, a VR-based system that enables users to train their cognitive empathy by using LLM-driven avatars with different personalities. Through dynamic role play, users actively engage in perspective-taking, experiencing situations through another person's eyes. CoEmpaTeam deploys three avatars who significantly differ in their personality, validated by a technical evaluation and an online experiment (n=90). Next, we evaluated the system through a lab experiment with 32 participants who performed three sessions across two weeks, followed by a one-week diary study. Our results showed a significant increase in cognitive empathy, which, according to participants, transferred into their real lives.
As VR expands into public spaces, new challenges emerge around spontaneous interactions between bystanders and unfamiliar VR users. While current VR systems often prioritize user awareness of their physical surroundings, they overlook the social dynamics affecting nearby bystanders. We conducted a deception-based study (N=80) examining how interface availability influences bystanders' comfort, confidence, and hesitation when interrupting VR users. We compared traditional static interruption interfaces (e.g., button on screen) with a proactive proxy that actively approached bystanders upon detecting interruption intent. Static interfaces, due to insufficient cueing, frequently caused bystander discomfort, leading to hesitant physical interruptions or complete communication avoidance. In contrast, the proactive proxy implicitly conveyed social permission, significantly enhancing bystanders' comfort and confidence. Our findings provide empirical insights into how bystanders assess availability and initiate interruptions with unfamiliar VR users in shared spaces, offering design implications for VR systems that support bystander agency and comfort during these interactions.
Virtual and Mixed Reality (XR) offer new opportunities for supporting social connection by reshaping embodied interaction and transforming social norms. We present Body RemiXer, an asymmetric XR installation designed to foster connection by inviting interpersonal touch, abstracting identity through ethereal avatars, encouraging synchronized interaction, and enabling impossible forms of shared embodiment. Through phenomenological interviews, we investigated how these design tactics mediated participants’ sense of connection. Our analysis reveals both potentials and tensions: abstraction lowered inhibitions and highlighted shared humanness but risked depersonalization; body mixing fostered unity but challenged virtual body ownership; mediated touch evoked closeness, but reminded of physical reality; and participants navigated bifurcated social norms across physical and virtual spaces. We contribute a nuanced account of these design trade-offs, advancing understanding of how abstraction, embodiment, touch, and social norm negotiation shape connection in XR, and outlining design considerations for crafting social XR experiences.
Virtual reality live streaming (VR streaming) is becoming increasingly popular as an entertainment medium, but its unique aspects of virtual camera usage remain underexplored. This paper presents a two-phase study investigating how VR streamers currently use virtual cameras to create engaging content for viewers on 2D displays. We first analyzed 8 popular Twitch streamers' videos totaling 2625 minutes to identify common virtual camera usage. Then, we interviewed 10 media experts all with about 10+ years of professional experience to derive design considerations for VR streamers and design implications for future developers. We also proposed the Immersion Triangle, a conceptual framework to analyze and explore the concept of immersion within VR streaming context. Our findings highlight VR streaming as a novel mass media format that can offer new perspectives on both VR and live streaming. This study also suggests opportunities for future research to enhance interactions between streamers and their viewers.
In organizational and team decision-making, it is critical for each member to engage in discussions from a broader perspective, without fixating on personal values and knowledge. Self-distancing has been proposed as a means of supporting such a perspective; however, its role in multiparty group discussions with decision-making remains underexplored. We applied self-distancing to immersive virtual environments to examine its effects on group decision-making. A total of 144 participants (48 triads, aged 20–49) experienced two types of decision-making tasks under either a self-distanced perspective, observing their self-avatar from behind, or a self-immersed perspective, observing it from the first person. The results showed that embodied self-distancing significantly affected decision-making quality (improved consensus agreement and opinion inference accuracy), communication behavior (increased gestures regulating conversational flow), and group members’ perceptions (reduced intragroup conflict and affective interdependence). Overall, embodied self-distancing may be suitable for situations that require the prevention or mitigation of conflict but less suitable for situations that require empathy and attentive listening.