Strangers and Friends Meet in Virtual Reality: The Influence of Prior Acquaintance in Social VR Scenarios

Esen K Tütüncü¹Ramon Oliva Martínez¹Mel Slater^2*

• ¹University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
• ²Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Virtual Reality is typically considered as an experience for a single person at a time. However, since the early 1990s systems have been developed and studied that allow multiple people to inhabit the same virtual space with each person represented by a virtual body that responds to their movements in real time through head and body tracking. Corresponding to this technical capability the concepts of copresence (the sensation of being with others) and social presence (the psychological correlates of being and interacting with others) have been studied. One important contributor to the outcome of a virtual meeting may be the prior relations between the individuals. Just as in real meetings the dynamics of social interactions may differ depending on whether the participants were already friends or strangers. Here we report on a study with 50 participants each in one of 16 groups of 3 or 4 people and a moderator, where 8 of the groups consisted of friends and the other groups of strangers. Each participant had a virtual body that looked like themselves. They engaged in a moderator-led discussion for about 17 minutes. We measured questionnaire responses of presence and copresence, a sentiment analysis of participant post experience essays, analysis of talking times and turn taking, and social network analysis. We found that the Friends group had higher reported copresence, had higher sentiment, and engaged in behaviors such as dyadic turn taking more than the groups of Strangers. When designing and deploying immersive social encounters prior relationships between participants should be considered where possible, since these can significantly alter how the dynamics of the social interaction unfold. * This variable is reverse coded, so that lower values indicate that being virtual did not take away the quality of the discussion.