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.

The need for remote usability testing has increased during the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic. However, lockdown and physical distancing regulations have affected how HCI researchers conduct in-person tests of systems and technologies under design. We present a Pop-Up Observation Kit, which serves as an affordable mobile usability lab. The kit is sent to participants of a study alongside the system they are testing. The Pop-Up Observation Kit provides a simple, unobtrusive form factor that enables the study participant to concentrate on the task itself and not on documenting the task they are performing. While initially developed to observe hand and finger gestures on a pressure sensor mat for the Rich Interactive Materials for everyday objects project, the Pop-up Observation Kit also applies to other use cases. Additionally, the kit is extensible with additional functionalities combined with the sensor mat to enable better data collection or unmoderated remote observations.