Transforming and Quantifying Social Interactions in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) enables social interactions beyond what is possible in face-to-face interaction. In VR, individuals can perceive virtual scenes different from their physical surroundings and embody avatars with characteristics dissimilar to their own. Formally, Transformed Social Interaction (TSI) describes techniques that alter the nature of social interactions through decoupling signals such as nonverbal behavior and transforming them before rendering these signals to users in virtual environments. VHIL researchers have shown that these transformations can alter and augment how individuals choose to interact and perceive others in immersive environments. 

For example, in the a large-scale, longitudinal field experiment examining groups in VR, we studied how different avatar appearance and virtual environment characteristics influence people’s behavior and attitudes over time. Transformations can also be applied to time, allowing individuals to travel back in time and join in on past social scenes. We found that altering nonverbal behaviors of past social interactions leads to greater sense of social presence and perceived attention. Another thread of our research examines transformations occurring on the bodily level. What happens when sensations such as private touch can be shared across individuals?

As the metaverse expands, understanding how people use VR technologies to learn and connect becomes increasingly important. The large-scale VR classroom study has lent itself beneficial to many exciting questions about the personal identifiability of VR motion, spatial dimensions of virtual spaces, linguistic patterns, turn-taking behaviors, and collaborative design behaviors. We continue to innovate on present studies and methods to quantify and augment social interactions by looking into the ways groups share experiences and navigate perceptual conflicts and technological asymmetries. 

For more information, contact Cyan DeVeaux (cyanjd@stanford.edu), Eugy Han (eugyoung@stanford.edu), Monique Santoso (mtsantoso@stanford.edu), and Portia Wang (portiaw@stanford.edu).