This project studies virtual reality (VR) as a social environment. Previous research has mainly concentrated on VR as an environment for creating individual experiences. The next big leap in VR development will be multi-user interaction, which will open new possibilities for connecting people at work and during leisure. However, VR has not been studied with a focus on human sociality. This project is the first one to bring together human sciences (interaction research) and computer science for a cross-disciplinary study of social VR. This project collects video recordings of interactions in VR. Using video-based multimodal conversation analysis, the project aims to reveal recurring interactional practices in the production and ascription of social actions in VR. The project reveals what is happening in interaction when people use VR together and what solutions VR might provide to the challenges identified in distributed collaboration. The project is conducted at the University of Oulu.

2022

2025