Social VR - Immersive Social Interaction in Virtual Environments

Immersive Virtual Social Interaction in spatial realities offers many new opportunities such as customer contact points with seller-avatars or AI-based agents, virtual team meetings and training sessions, social inspection of digital twins of complex products, collaboration around virtual 3D objects or 2D canvases, therapeutical sessions to fight anxieties. These scenarios also pose novel research questions: How are people positioning? Do people trust virtual agents? Can teams build a joint team identity and emotional relationships in a virtual space? And much more. At Spatialytix.org we work on a framework to explore such scenarios and study them. This involves a systematic exploration of possible use cases, a conceptual framework to guide the design of virtual social interaction and a technical framework for creating re- usable and configurable virtual interaction experiences. This website gives a short overview about this work.

Social Virtual Interaction Design is very complex due to the overwhelming degrees of freedom. Based on prototyping, experimenting and practice, our team continuously evolves design frameworks on a theoretical/conceptual level but also on a technical level, as a Unity-based software project, for others to configure and re-use. At Spatialytix.org we work on a framework to explore such scenarios and study them. This involves a systematic exploration of possible use cases, a conceptual framework to guide the design of virtual social interaction and a technical framework for creating re- usable and configurable virtual interaction experiences. This website gives a short overview about this work. Conceptual Design Framework for Virtual Social Interaction Environments - Theory-based Design Categories based on Interactionist Theories - Literature-based Definition of Key theoretical concepts - Design-Science compliant design process model Four Layer model to design SVR Experiences:

Developing Conceptual and Technical Design Frameworks

Unity-based Software Framework - Reusable Unity Project that can be adapted - Generalized Architecture to cover different interaction scenarios - Tested in various experiments and constantly evolving

VERSE Tool supports the Analysis of Interaction in Social VR

Our VERSE tool enables a systematic analysis of immersive virtual interaction among users. The current focus is on supporting the facilitator (researcher or moderator) of a virtual encounter between two users in VR in an office-like environment. While the users cooperate on a task or converse with each other, the facilitator can intervene or collect data on gazes, non-verbal communication and the cooperation outcomes. This process is supported by a special facilitator interface and a data-model driven export facility.

Interaction with LLM-based AI Agents with „Spatial Awareness“

A spatially aware anthropomorphized AI agent was implemented in a recent prototypical implementation. The agent can recognize, where the user stands, points at or looks at to contextualize the human-AI-interaction and can then answer any spoken question by users, thus engaging in a very realistic information-oriented encounter, where users can take individual learning paths through an exhibition and the expert guide follows accordingly.

Analyzing Virtual Social Interaction