Making virtual reality (VR) more accessible for novice and nondigital users has largely focused on single-user solutions, such as tutorials, tooltips, and visual guidance cues. While structured onboarding protocols have proven effective, they do not scale well for multiple collocated users due to varying assistance needs, different learning speeds, and guidance preferences. Additionally, the sudden isolation upon entering VR can cause disorientation, particularly in group settings where users may lose awareness of their physical and social surrounding. This paper proposes a novel onboarding framework that extends traditional procedures with four phases: 1) entering video see-through mixed reality after putting on the HMD, 2) interactive tutorials in mixed reality, 3) adaptive group transition strategies into VR, and 4) structured exit mechanisms. In our implementation of the framework, we explore three concepts for group transitions: individual, sequential, and collective. In a user study with 36 participants, we collected feedback on our mixedreality onboarding approach and evaluate the usability, co-presence, agency, and continuity of our three proposed transition techniques and compare it to the common direct transition into virtual reality. Our results indicate a clear preference for onboarding through an additional mixed reality stage and provide valuable insights into advantages and trade-offs of the different group transition strategies.

In collocated social virtual reality, the relative physical and virtual positions of users are often synchronised to reduce audio-visual inconsistencies and the risk of collisions between users. For virtual navigation previous work has proposed group navigation techniques that maintain spatial synchronisation. This, however, limits user autonomy and can be particularly frustrating when some users would prefer to remain at their current virtual position, as can be the case when users have differing goals, interests, or tasks within the virtual environment. In this paper, we introduce a two-phase confirmation-based group navigation concept for collocated scenarios which allows users to stay behind and catch up to the group based on individual confirmation. The confirmation to catch up can be triggered by the group’s guide, the individual user or both. Ghost avatars, which visualise the physical locations of other users, are used to avoid physical collisions in situations where part of the group has already virtually navigated to a new location. We evaluate the three confirmation-based techniques in a user study (N = 24) in the context of a guided tour in a virtual museum and compare it to a baseline group navigation technique. Our findings show that users prefer having the autonomy to decide when to follow their group. Despite increased complexity, the proposed techniques achieved comparable levels of co-presence, spatial orientation, and understanding of others’ positions in both the virtual and physical environments as the baseline, effectively balancing user autonomy, navigation understanding and social experience.

Standing in a large crowd can be uncomfortable and usually results in other users obstructing the view of the virtual environment. In this paper, we present four techniques designed to improve the user’s view in crowded environments. Inspired by related work on various transparency and clipping techniques, as well as observed user behavior in crowded scenarios, our paper addresses the visibility problem by locally manipulating the appearance of other users. Three of our techniques define a region of interest using a handheld flashlight metaphor. Depending on the technique, occluding users are either pushed to the side, scaled, or made partially transparent. The fourth technique allows users to vertically adjust their position. A user study with 24 participants found that the transparency technique was advantageous for quick search tasks. However, in a realistic museum setting, no clear favorite could be determined because the techniques make different trade-offs and users weighted these aspects differently. In a final ranking, the vertical position adjustment and transparency techniques were the most popular, but the scaling technique and vertical position adjustment were found to be the most natural.

Immersive recordings capture virtual reality interactions and are used in various contexts such as education and entertainment. However, there has been only limited research on requirements and techniques for editing such recordings. We interviewed expert editors of video recordings to understand their workflows, familiarised them with immersive recordings, and asked them about what editing challenges and capabilities they can envision for immersive recordings. The experts identified several functionalities they considered relevant for editing, including viewer placement, control over the viewer’s size, support for live and asynchronous collaboration, and different transition types.

Embodied conversational agents are an established approach for immersively conveying the narratives and information of virtual museums. Recent advances in large language models and text-to-speech systems enable the active guidance of users by agents and raise the question of how such assistants should be visually embodied to engage visitors and promote knowledge transfer. This demo showcases a stylized humanoid guide, a novel animism-based approach with speaking objects, and a combination of both concepts to interactively guide users through a digital replica of the famous Gropius Room at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

The combination of smartphone Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) makes it possible for on-site and remote users to simultaneously explore a physical space and its digital twin through an asymmetric Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). In this paper, we investigate two spatial awareness visualizations to enable joint exploration of a space for dyads consisting of a smartphone AR user and a head-mounted display VR user. Our study revealed that both, a mini-map-based method and an egocentric compass method with a path visualization, enabled the on-site visitors to locate and follow a virtual companion reliably and quickly. Furthermore, the embodiment of the AR user by an inverse kinematics avatar allowed the use of natural gestures such as pointing and waving which was preferred over text messages by the participants of our study. In an expert review in a museum and its digital twin we observed an overall high social presence for on-site AR and remote VR visitors and found that the visualizations and the avatar embodiment successfully facilitated their communication and collaboration.