In face-to-face interactions, people rely on facial expressions, body posture, and further verbal and non-verbal cues to infer others’ internal states. While collaborative virtual reality (VR) enables rich shared experiences, it offers fewer expressive cues, making perceiving mental states like attention, intention, or cognitive load (CL) more difficult. Rather than replicating real-world cues, we investigated how augmenting collaborative VR with real-time visualizations of users’ CL impacts social presence. We first conducted semi-structured interviews (N = 6) and an online survey (N = 54) to elicit user needs and design preferences for CL visualizations. These insights informed the development of a collaborative VR application evaluated in a lab experiment (N = 30). Participants engaged in verbal explanation tasks of varying difficulty while their CL was displayed using different visualizations (pie charts, bar charts, brain diagrams), including a no-visualization control condition. Social presence was measured using the Networked Minds Social Presence Inventory and augmented via post-experiment interviews. Our results show that in difficult tasks, pie chart visualizations helped sustain co-presence, while all diagrams supported affective understanding. These findings demonstrate the potential of intuitive CL visualizations to foster social connectedness, helping inform future designs of collaborative VR.

Figure 1: Illustration of a remote social interaction between two users waving each other in an augmented environment.The users wearing a head-mounted display are represented by a realistic avatar, with additional progressively abstract avatars displayed to showcase the varying levels of realism used in the experiment.

Professional and personal lives are undergoing a shift from physical to virtual meetings. While this offers numerous advantages, such as increased spatial autonomy, it also poses risks to the social bonds among employees, families, and friends. Even current collaborative virtual reality (VR) applications cannot bridge the separation in virtual meetings, as they do not provide a sense of social connectedness comparable to in-person interaction. Reasons include limited behavioral realism of VR avatars, e.g., in displayed body movements. We systematically investigated how realistic body movements influence Social Presence in a collaborative VR task. We explored three types of motion-tracking mechanisms: no motion-tracking beyond controllers, hand-tracking, and full-body motion-tracking with hand-tracking. To examine their influence on Social Presence, we designed a spatial collaboration task based on insights gained from semi-structured interviews ( N = 6). Subsequently, we conducted a controlled VR experiment ( N = 18), in which participants' counterparts employed the various motion-tracking technologies while performing said task. Our results demonstrate that realistic body movements do not influence self-reported Social Presence in VR. Nevertheless, they entail an increased interpersonal distance among users, attributable to a subconscious influence on Social Presence.

As the world becomes more interconnected, physical separation between people increases. Existing collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) applications, designed to bridge this distance, are not yet sufficient in providing a sense of social connection comparable to face-to-face interactions. Possible reasons are the limited multimodality of VR systems and the lack of non-verbal cues in VR avatars. We systematically investigated how facial expressions influence Social Presence in two collaborative VR tasks. We explored four types of facial expressions: eyes and mouth movements, their combination, and no expressions, for two types of explanations: verbal and graphical. To examine how these expressions influence Social Presence, we conducted a controlled VR experiment (N = 48), in which participants had to explain a specific term to their counterpart. Our results demonstrate that eye and mouth movements positively influence Social Presence in VR. Particularly, combining verbal explanations and eye movements induces the highest feeling of co-presence.

German Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are in crisis, struggling with an increasing shortage of skilled workers, ultimately putting patients’ safety at risk. To counteract this process, researchers are increasingly concerned with finding digital solutions which aim to support healthcare professionals by enhancing the efficiency of reoccurring critical caring tasks and thus, improve working conditions. In this regard, this paper evaluates the application of Augmented Reality (AR) for patient monitoring for critical care nursing. Grounded on an observational study, semi-structured interviews, as well as a quantitative analysis, mobile patient monitoring scenarios, present particularly during patient transport, were identified as an innovative context of use of AR in the field. Additionally, user requirements such as high wearability, hands-free operability, and clear data representation could be derived from the obtained study results. For validation of these and identification of further requirements, three prototypes differing in their data illustration format were subsequently developed and quantitatively, as well as qualitatively evaluated by conducting an online survey. Thereby, it became evident that future implementations of a corresponding system for patient monitoring ought to integrate a context-dependent data presentation in particular, as this combines high navigability and availability of required data. Identifying patient monitoring during patient transport as a potential context of use, as well as distinguishing a context-dependent design approach as favorable constitute two key contributions of this work and provide a foundation on which future implementations of AR systems in the nursing domain and other related contexts can be established.