Engaging in rhythmic synchronized activities such as dancing or coordinated exercises is a powerful driver of social connection, as interpersonal entrainment promotes feelings of closeness, empathy, and cooperation. However, in media-based settings such as Social Virtual Reality (SVR), maintaining synchrony is technically challenging. Even modest latency can disrupt the temporal coordination needed for shared rhythm, thereby diminishing social presence, user engagement and the quality of interaction. Our work explores whether synchrony-reinforcing feedback can mitigate latency effects in a dyadic VR rowing task. Participants received real-time visual, audio, or audio-visual feedback: visual feedback was provided through particle effects, and audio feedback through music, both of which intensified with stronger synchronization and diminished as it weakened. Latency was systematically varied. Our findings show that latency, especially higher delays, significantly disrupts coordination and a sense of togetherness. Participants often misattribute these disruptions to personal or interpersonal factors. Audio-visual feedback reduces these effects, supporting smoother interaction and masking symptoms of latency. The task load remains stable across latency levels, but decreases when clear, multimodal feedback is provided. Notably, while closeness remains robust, togetherness deteriorates in the absence of timely, multimodal cues. Our results suggest that latency effects can be partially addressed through perceptual design. Providing multimodal feedback is a key strategy for maintaining synchrony, reducing cognitive effort, and sustaining meaningful social interaction in latency-prone environments.

Shared synchronised activities, such as dancing and singing, can promote social bonding in both physical and virtual settings, but are susceptible to network latencies in mediated environments, such as social virtual reality (VR). Temporal delays can hinder interpersonal entrainment, causing users to feel out of sync, and reduce presence. While prior work has examined how stimulus type and frequency affect synchrony perception, the role of rhythmic interaction, central to many interactive synchronised experiences, remains unexplored. We conducted a within-subject study with 32 participants to systematically investigate how rhythmic interaction shapes synchrony perception of rhythmic audiovisual stimuli in networked VR environments. Motor behaviour and subjective synchrony ratings ($\mathrm{n}=32$) are analysed, complemented by eye-tracking metrics from a quality-controlled subset ($\mathrm{n}=25$). Through controlled stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between audio and video stimuli, we simulate network latency scenarios wshere (1) audio precedes video (as in VR dance environments where music playback is synchronised to a global clock while remote dancer movements appear delayed), and (2) video precedes audio (as in orchestra experiences where a conductor's movements are perceived first, followed by a delayed auditory response from the orchestra). Participants either synchronised hand movements with a virtual avatar or passively observed it across two stimulus frequencies (0.5 Hz and 1 Hz), for both audio- and video-leading offsets. Our results show that rhythmic interaction significantly increases tolerance to audiovisual offsets, shifting the left decision criterion (LDC) by up to 66 ms, the point of subjective synchrony (PSS) by up to 31 ms, and widening the window of subjective synchrony (WSS) by up to 59 ms. These effects suggest that rhythmic interaction can reduce sensitivity to asynchronies in audio-leading scenarios, such as VR dance environments. We also found that temporal offsets influence rhythmic interaction behaviour and confirm that recent findings on the influence of stimulus frequency on PSS and temporal offsets on pupil dilation can to a certain extent be replicated in interactive VR.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.