Enhanced Auditoriums for Attending Talks in Social Virtual Reality

@inproceedings{10.1145/3544549.3585718,
author = {Weissker, Tim and Pieters, Leander and Kuhlen, Torsten},
title = {Enhanced Auditoriums for Attending Talks in Social Virtual Reality},
year = {2023},
isbn = {9781450394222},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585718},
doi = {10.1145/3544549.3585718},
abstract = {Replicating traditional auditorium layouts for attending talks in social virtual reality often results in poor visibility of the presentation and a reduced feeling of being there together with others. Motivated by the use case of academic conferences, we therefore propose to display miniature representations of the stage close to the viewers for enhanced presentation visibility as well as group table arrangements for enhanced social co-watching. We conducted an initial user study with 12 participants in groups of three to evaluate the influence of these ideas on audience experience. Our results confirm the hypothesized positive effects of both enhancements and show that their combination was particularly appreciated by audience members. Our results therefore strongly encourage us to rethink conventional auditorium layouts in social virtual reality.},
booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {101},
numpages = {7},
keywords = {Audience Experience, Head-Mounted Display, Multi-User, Social Interaction, Virtual Presentations, Virtual Reality},
location = {<conf-loc>, <city>Hamburg</city>, <country>Germany</country>, </conf-loc>},
series = {CHI EA '23}
}