From flat screens to full immersion: Social interaction in VR2Gather, Horizon Workrooms, and MS Teams

Recent advancements in immersive communication technologies have facilitated the exploration of novel modalities of social interaction, utilizing platforms that offer a spectrum of representations from simplified avatars to photorealistic volumetric and point-cloud reconstructions. This study focused on how these different representations and degrees of immersion impact communication processes and collaborative task performance. The primary objective was to examine potential variances in performance and interaction quality across different systems during a basic communication task. To achieve this, we employed Meta Horizon Workrooms as a three degrees of freedom (3DoF) system, VR2Gather as a six degrees of freedom (6DoF) system, and the MS Teams meeting application as a comparative benchmark. A user study was conducted whereby participants engaged in a charade game, alternating between the roles of "mimic" and "guesser." Throughout the experimental session, data were collected to assess comfort, presence, task load, and interaction quality, with performance quantified by the number of words guessed per minute. The findings indicated no significant differences in workload, presence, or simulator sickness across platforms; however, significant differences were observed in audio-visual quality, communication effort, and enjoyment. Performance metrics revealed that participants exhibited the highest task performance within MS Teams, followed by VR2Gather, and subsequently Horizon Workrooms. These findings underscore the influence of embodiment fidelity and system familiarity on communication quality within immersive environments. We discuss system-level constraints and propose considerations for the design of future social extended reality (XR) platforms that effectively balance realism with usability and performance.

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