Understanding How Users Engage in an Immersive Virtual Reality-Based Live Event

Virtual Reality combined with social functioning is a lucrative business direction. Due to COVID-19, a need for better social interaction is identified urgently both in education institutes and the business sector. In this paper, we will show two business cases where social functioning is needed. The first one illustrates how the business sector can use Virtual Reality Social Platform (VRSP) in remote events. As a case study, we have selected Spinverse’s Summer Day organized in Microsoft AltspaceVR. The second business case, in turn, classifies requirements for Virtual Reality Social platforms. This has been studied in close cooperation with XR Presence. Results show that current technologies offer many features to be used, but at the same time, there are needs for further development. In addition, more studies are needed in technology acceptance, usability, user experience, and business impact

An Investigation of the Advantages and Disadvantages of University Students as Avatars in Virtual Learning Spaces

Authors have noted the increasing importance of avatars in Higher Education, as more teaching is conducted virtually, drawing upon gaming conventions. However, it is also recognised that little is known about how students make use of avatars (especially over an extended period) and the subsequent impact on learning experiences. For the last three years, a university module has been conducted within a persistent virtual world – where students (49 in 2020; 95 in 2021; 122 in 2022) predominantly interact with each other and teaching staff in avatar form. Observation data constitutes 60 hours of video recordings of virtual world seminars. Students have also been surveyed (average 40% response rate) and interviewed. The experience of learning on this module while in avatar form has been extremely positive, with students expressing many advantages to being an avatar – including the ability to express oneself in original/engaging ways, the ability to move freely in the environment (less restricted by social norms), increased confidence to speak up in class, reduced concern over actual physical appearance, and being praised for their avatar. Nevertheless, disadvantages were also apparent, including the distracting nature of certain avatars, inappropriate behaviours, usability challenges in designing an avatar, and lack of sense of self. An initial design framework for the use of avatars in Higher Education is proposed

From Teleportation to Climbing: A Review of Locomotion Techniques in the Most Used Commercial Virtual Reality Applications

Exploration of virtual reality locomotion has a rich history, including in the creation of taxonomies categorising individual techniques. However, most existing research collects data from academic sources only, with both historic industry practitioner exploration and a state-of-the-art understanding of locomotion in commercial applications comparatively underexplored. This systematic software-level review of the complete locomotion options in 330 of the most used virtual reality applications released between 2016 and 2023 on the Steam, Meta, Oculus, Viveport, and SideQuest platforms highlights the trends and gaps that exist between industry and academic exploration. Results suggest a decline in the usage of teleportation, with the prevalence of titles containing at least one teleportation technique decreasing from 48% of those released in 2016 to 18% in 2023. Arm-tracked grabbing locomotion techniques such as climbing meanwhile are being increasingly adopted by practitioners, from almost unused in 3% of applications released in 2016 to over 30% in each year between 2020 and 2023. Additionally, although the tracking capabilities afforded by consumer-level head-mounted display hardware has resulted in a high exploration of room-scale tracking, the large academic focus on walking-based locomotion appears to not be shared by practitioners, where room-scale tracking instead is most often paired with conventional controller joystick sliding locomotion. Finally, temporal analysis results showing the growing number of locomotion techniques offered in an average application signifies the need for further accessibility-related locomotion research, particularly in areas beyond visual sickness mitigation. Our findings highlight the continuing evolution of locomotion in commercial virtual reality applications, with industry practitioner locomotion technique adoption rates displaying the divergent interests between industry and academia, in turn adding rigour to future locomotion selections across both domains