Social VR: A New Medium for Remote Communication and Collaboration

Abstract

We are facing increasingly pressure on reducing travel and working remotely. Tools that support effective remote communication and collaboration are much needed. Social Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging medium, which invites multiple users to join a collaborative virtual environment (VE) and has the potential to support remote communication in a natural and immersive way. We successfully organized a CHI 2020 Social VR workshop virtually on Mozilla Hubs, which invited researchers and practitioners to have a fruitful discussion over user representations and ethics, evaluation methods, and interaction techniques for social VR as an emerging immersive remote communication tool. In this CHI 2021 virtual workshop, we would like to organize it again on Mozilla Hubs, continuing the discussion about proxemics, social cues and VE designs, which were identified as important aspects for social VR communication in our CHI 2020 workshop.