“Hello I am Here”: The Role of Proximal Nonverbal Cues in Initiating Social Interactions in VR

Authors: @amalwalied @slimabdennadher

Our social signaling technique is designed to make people more aware of each other in VR to enrich their social interactions. The technique leverages 3 nonverbal cues shown in Figures A, B, and C. In A, we use an arrow to tell a user where the other user is standing, when the other user is not within the field-of-view. In B, a short sound plays when the user turns to face the other user, and in C, the name and interests of the other user are displayed for smooth interaction initiations.

Social VR has attracted attention in the recent years due to travel restrictions the recent pademic caused. When we started to work on this paper, we wanted to see how can we make users’ social interactions within VR better and richer. Therefore, we have investigated the research made to identify the reasons people use Social VR platforms. We have found out that users use VR to (source):

1. Socialize and meet new people
2. Experience Social Presence

This has led us to investigate how can we increase social presence and facilitate communication in Social VR. We found out that social presence is a construct in social psychology that measures the degree of user’s awareness of other users and that there is a research gap in features that support others’ presence (source), which is the degree of people’s awareness of others’ availability for interaction. So we designed proximal nonverbal cues as a social signaling technique that notifies a user when there is another is within close proximity. Our technique (proximal nonverbal cues) leverages proxemics theory and nonverbal communication to convey information about other user’s location, name, and interests for increased others’ presence and enjoyment.

A flowchart that show cases how our designed proximal nonverbal cues work.

Now we want to see whether our designed signaling technique achieves the aim, so we made a user study to assess the impact of our designed (signaling technique) proximal nonverbal cues. In the experiment, pairs get into a virtual room, where they have a small conversation. Afterwards, we interviewed the pairs of the experiment to get their feedback. Our results show that proximal nonverbal cues in social VR made the virtual experience seem more real to the participants and enhanced the quality of their interaction, especially among the pairs who were familiar with each other. For pairs who were strangers, proximal nonverbal cues stimulated their creativity (e.g. coming up with games to play in the virtual room). However, this is at the cost of slight increase in the mental demand.

In the future, our proximal nonverbal cues can be utilized as a signaling features in social VR apps and as a virtual assistant to party-goers (in the virtual world or real one ;)) who love to mingle!