AUTHOR=Bonfert Michael , Reinschluessel Anke V. , Putze Susanne , Lai  Yenchin , Alexandrovsky Dmitry , Malaka  Rainer , Döring Tanja TITLE=Seeing the faces is so important—Experiences from online team meetings on commercial virtual reality platforms JOURNAL=Frontiers in Virtual Reality VOLUME=3 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virtual-reality/articles/10.3389/frvir.2022.945791 DOI=10.3389/frvir.2022.945791 ISSN=2673-4192 ABSTRACT=

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online meetings became common for daily teamwork in the home office. To understand the opportunities and challenges of meeting in virtual reality (VR) compared to videoconferences, we conducted the weekly team meetings of our human-computer interaction research lab on five off-the-shelf online meeting platforms over 4 months. After each of the 12 meetings, we asked the participants (N = 32) to share their experiences, resulting in 200 completed online questionnaires. We evaluated the ratings of the overall meeting experience and conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the quantitative data to compare VR meetings and video calls in terms of meeting involvement and co-presence. In addition, a thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed genuine insights covering five themes: spatial aspects, meeting atmosphere, expression of emotions, meeting productivity, and user needs. We reflect on our findings gained under authentic working conditions, derive lessons learned for running successful team meetings in VR supporting different kinds of meeting formats, and discuss the team’s long-term platform choice.