Older adults, a growing demographic, face an increased risk of experiencing loneliness and are less exposed to emerging communication technologies. Augmented reality (AR) avatars and telepresence robots have been proposed as tools to foster social connection, yet their suitability for older users remains underexplored. We present an exploratory study with ten healthy older adults who engaged in both conversational and spatial collaboration tasks using AR avatar-mediated communication, robot-mediated communication, and face-to-face interaction. We collected self-reported measures of co-presence, social presence, closeness, uncanny valley, preferences, and open feedback. Our findings suggest that telepresence robots enhanced co-presence, while avatars were valued for their expressivity and humanlike qualities. Task type influenced co-presence in spatial collaboration only during communication using the telepresence robot. Other measures, such as social presence and closeness, were unaffected by task type or representation. While neither technology outperformed face-to-face interaction, both were positively received, underscoring their potential to address the social needs of older adults and highlighting the importance of enhancing nonverbal expressivity, particularly nonverbal cues in mediated communication. Ultimately, our results contribute to the fundamental understanding of mediated communication with older adults, motivating further empirical work to confirm and extend these findings.

Considering the increase in using teleconferencing in the daily lives of everyone, it becomes more important to provide a good experience while attending remote meetings. Various new technologies have been proposed, ranging from AR/VR setups to enhanced 2D systems with the added possibility of automatic tracking of a person. This exploration paper investigates the impact of automatic camera tracking on virtual communication, focusing on task performance. Using a custom video conference setup combined with the TrackingMaster system (2D LiDAR-based tracking and PTZ camera framing), three tracking configurations were tested: static, tracking-without-presets, and tracking-with-presets. Participants performed various adapted survival tasks designed to encourage movement and interaction. The results showed that tracking with presets enabled slightly faster task completion and required less movement. Furthermore, workload and social presence indicated no major variation across the tracking configurations. The findings suggest potential benefits of camera tracking systems but highlight the need for further research with larger samples and novel measurements to create validated metrics, especially regarding creativity in virtual communication.

We present ICS-MR, a dataset containing three conversational scenarios designed for the evaluation of communication quality in Mixed Reality (MR) systems. Along with detailed descriptions of the conversation tasks, we provide all the materials required to incorporate the tasks into MR user studies. The materials also support application of the scenarios in real-world and video-conferencing contexts for studies that, for example, call for comparison of immersive systems against reference communication media. Open-source Unity implementations of the scenarios are also made available, supporting direct usage of the scenarios in distributed, multi-user experiments. The conversation tasks have all been administered in recent scientific works that address the evaluation of user experiences in immersive communication systems, allowing analysis and comparison of each scenario's evoked behavioral properties. The ICS-MR dataset therefore contributes valuable resources for further research on communication in immersive systems.

The Audiovisual Multimodal Interaction Suite (AMIS) is an open-source dataset and accompanying Unity-based demo implementation designed to aid research on immersive media communication and social XR environments. AMIS features synchronized audiovisual recordings of three actors performing monologues and participating in dyadic conversations across four modalities: talking-head videos, full-body videos, volumetric avatars, and personalized animated avatars. These recordings can be used to simulate scenarios such as traditional video conferences or XR meetings with 3D avatars in controlled and replicable environments. The limitations of existing datasets, which include a restricted number of audiovisual formats, a narrow application focus, and suboptimal inclusion of verbal and non-verbal cues, are addressed by AMIS. With AMIS Studio, a Unity-based demonstrator, researchers can explore the recordings and compare the different audiovisual formats in VR scenes. This paper outlines the creation of AMIS, its design considerations, and how it may be applied in interdisciplinary domains, including cognitive psychology, audiovisual quality assessment, and social XR research.

Group-to-group telepresence systems immerse geographically separated groups in a shared interaction space where remote users are represented as avatars. Notably, such systems allow users to interact with collocated and remote interlocutors simultaneously. In this context, where virtual user representations can be directly compared with real users, we investigate how visual realism (avatar type) and aural realism (presence of spatial audio) affect communication. Furthermore, we examine how communication differs between collocated and remote pairs of interlocutors. In our user study, groups of four participants perform a collaborative conversation task under the aforementioned visual and aural realism conditions. Our results indicate that avatar realism has positive effects on subjective ratings of perceived message understanding and group cohesion, and yields behavioural differences that indicate more interactivity and engagement. Few significant effects of aural realism were observed. Comparisons between collocated and remote communication found that collocated communication was perceived as more effective, but that more visual attention was paid to both remote participants than the collocated user.

Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to meet, converse, and collaborate in shared virtual environments. For such communication systems, many system factors can affect user experience and perception. To effectively allocate system resources, understanding of the relative influence of such factors is required. One important factor is a spatial auralization, which has been shown to elevate users’ experience in traditional and single-user VR systems. However, its effect in multi-party social VR has not been fully investigated. In this work, we conducted a study assessing the effect of spatial audio on audiovisual plausibility and presence perception in a three-user interactive communication scenario. Triads of participants perform a collaborative conversation task under three conditions: a VR condition with binaural spatial audio, a VR condition with simple diotic audio, and a real-world reference condition. This paper presents the results of the study based on questionnaire-based evaluation.

Spatial audio representations have been shown to positively impact user experience in traditional, non-immersive communication media. While spatial audio also contributes to presence in single-user immersive VR, its impact in virtual communication scenarios has not yet been fully understood. This work aims to further investigate which communication scenarios benefit from spatial audio representations. We present a study in which pairs of interlocutors undertake a collaborative task in an audiovisual Virtual Environment (VE) under different auralization and scene arrangement conditions. The novel task is designed to encourage simultaneous conversation and movement, with the aim of increasing the relevance of spatial hearing. Results are obtained through questionnaires measuring social presence and plausibility, as well as through conversational and behavioral analysis. Although participants are shown to favor binaural auralization over diotic audio in a direct active-listening comparison, no significant differences in social presence, plausibility, or communication behavior could be found. Our results suggest that spatial audio may not affect user experience in dyadic communication scenarios where spatial auditory information is not directly relevant to the considered task.

Virtual Reality (VR) has become an important tool for conducting behavioral studies in realistic, reproducible environments. In this paper, we present ISA, an Immersive Study Analyzer system designed for the comprehensive analysis of social VR studies. For in-depth analysis of participant behavior, ISA records all user actions, speech, and the contextual environment of social VR studies. A key feature is the ability to review and analyze such immersive recordings collaboratively in VR, through support of behavioral coding and user-defined analysis queries for efficient identification of complex behavior. Respatialization of the recorded audio streams enables analysts to follow study participants' conversations in a natural and intuitive way. To support phases of close and loosely coupled collaboration, ISA allows joint and individual temporal navigation, and provides tools to facilitate collaboration among users at different temporal positions. An expert review confirms that ISA effectively supports collaborative immersive analysis, providing a novel and effective tool for nuanced understanding of user behavior in social VR studies.

This paper presents a proof-of-concept study conducted to analyze the effect of simple diotic vs. spatial, position-dynamic binaural synthesis on social presence in VR, in comparison with face-to-face communication in the real world, for a sample two-party scenario. A conversational task with shared visual reference was realized. The collected data includes questionnaires for direct assessment, tracking data, and audio and video recordings of the individual participants’ sessions for indirect evaluation. While tendencies for improvements with binaural over diotic presentation can be observed, no significant difference in social presence was found for the considered scenario. The gestural analysis revealed that participants used the same amount and type of gestures in face-to-face as in VR, highlighting the importance of non-verbal behavior in communication. As part of the research, an end-to-end framework for conducting communication studies and analysis has been developed.