The imprisonment of parents has severe consequences for their relationship to their children. Thus, ensuring valuable contact between them is crucial for parent's social rehabilitation and children's development and well-being. However, visits are often not child-friendly and lack interaction. We see social VR as a means to address these issues. In this paper, we share findings of a user-centered design process of a virtual reality application that allows imprisoned parents to meet their children. Our pilot study with four dyads of children and imprisoned fathers revealed that both appreciated the virtual visits, felt close to each other, and had a positive emotional experience, although fathers missed physical contact. Children preferred VR's playful and interactive nature compared to regular visits. Our research presents virtual visits as a suitable alternative to ensure valuable social interaction between prisoners and their children and contribute to the potential of immersive virtual social experiences for sensitive use cases.

Consumer social virtual reality (VR) applications have recently started to enable social interactions at a distance. Yet it is still relatively unknown if and to what extent such applications provide meaningful social experiences in cases where in-person leisure activities are not feasible. To explore this, we developed a custom social VR application and conducted an exploratory lab study with 25 dyads in which we compared an in-person and a virtual version of a co-located multiplayer scenario. Our mixed-methods analysis revealed that both scenarios created a socially rich atmosphere and strengthened the social closeness between players. However, the lack of facial animations, limited body language, and a low field of view led to VR’s main social experiential limitations: a reduced mutual awareness and emotional understanding compared to the in-person scenario. We derive implications for social VR design and research as well as game user research.

Current Social VR literature provides limited insight on one of the most critical behaviors for developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships: self-disclosure. Therefore, we present an online survey (N = 126) investigating how users disclose personal information to each other in Social VR. Our results indicate that many participants see in Social VR access to authentic connections with others despite tending towards skepticism and privacy concerns. Most users disclose sexuality-related information, lifestyle preferences, and personal goals. In contrast, information that breaks anonymity, such as real names and more intimate aspects of oneself, are shared less commonly. Thereby, self-disclosure decisions depend on factors like the relationship to or age of disclosure recipients, the privacy of a virtual environment, the group size, or the activity context, and is driven by different goals, i.a., relational development or exploration of oneself. These insights advance the understanding of current Social VR users and their behavior by directing future research on self-disclosure-based relationship building in Social VR and outlying broader design implications for the future metaverse.

We present online survey results on social virtual reality (social VR) users' activities and usage motives. Based on content analysis of users' free-text responses, we found that most users, in fact, use these applications for social activities and to satisfy diverse social needs. The second most frequently mentioned categories of activities and motives relate to experiential aspects such as entertainment activities. Another important category of motives, which has only recently been described in related work, relates to the self, such as personal growth. Our results indicate that while social VR provides a superior social experience than traditional digital social spaces, like games or social media, users still desire better and affordable tracking technology, increased sensory immersion, and further improvement concerning social features. These findings complement related work as they come from a comparatively large sample (N= 273) and summarize a general user view on social VR. Besides confirming an intuitive assumption, they help identify use cases and opportunities for further research on social VR.

We present user study results on virtual body contact experience in a two-user VR scenario, in which participants performed different touches with a research assistant. The interaction evoked different emotional reactions in perceived relaxation, happiness, desire, anxiety, disgust, and fear. Congruent to physical social touch, the evaluation of virtual body contact was modulated by intimacy, touch direction, and sex. Further, individual comfort with interpersonal touch was positively associated with perceived relaxation and happiness. We discuss the results regarding implications for follow-up studies and infer implications for the use of social touch in social VR applications.

Our research investigates the role of physical co-presence for the experience of multiplayer cooperation in virtual reality (VR). We developed and compared a shared-room (co-located) and separated-room (remote) version of a cooperative two-player VR game. In an extensive study (N=92) we assessed measures of task awareness and spatial presence, as well as player communication, interaction, and performance. Our results indicate that players sharing the same physical space tend to neglect the cooperative task. Moreover, our results indicate that being physically separated can beneficially impact the perceived cooperative social presence, quality of communication, and performance in contrast to sharing a physical space. The role of physical co-location in room-scale VR and potential confounding effects caused by it, as well as implications for further research, are discussed.

This paper presents the ongoing work on a technological pipeline to automate the recording and analysis of player speech data in the evaluation of player experience. The pipeline generates a heatmap that visualizes where the players in the virtual environment have made positive, negative, and neutral statements. Moreover, the heatmap provides spatiotemporal information of in-game events, as well as interactive features like filters and modifiers. We describe how the pipeline is set up for the Unity game engine, how we implemented the sentiment classification module as well as the visualization of the tracked data. Concluding, we define goals for further development.