Graduate School Project: Try to understand the dynamics of a group or situation.
We were given a broad prompt as a class, however, I knew when I joined the class that I wanted to focus on VR since it is one of my areas of interest. Aims of this study were to understand how a virtual community in VR functions and how it might be similar or different to how communities behave in the real world. The results of my observations may be of some use to VR developers.
Project Overview
My Role: Lead Researcher (I did everything)
Research Question:
What are ways a VR community different/similar to a community in the real world?
Approach
Length of study: Feb 15th, 2020 – Apr 15th, 2020
Ethnographic Observation
Interviews
Supplemental Research
Sample
E-Sports Team: VRespawn
Summarized Findings
Most of a VR player’s communication happens through voice chat and will not involve face-to-face interaction.
There is evidence that players feel an increased amount of “social presence” among other players in virtual reality. This can be seen with instances of non-verbal communication in face-to-face interactions as the use of gestures and eye contact.
Gestures can be, and are used to communicate with one another when language is not available. This is seen with players who have their voice chat is unavailable.
Members of the Echo Arena/Combat video game community are highly organized and structured in order to facilitate games and community. The players feel like they are part of a community pioneering VR bringing an increased amount of camaraderie among the groups.
Sample Finding
The number of non-verbal communication cues were greatly influenced by the conditions surrounding the players, such as: the size of the room the players were in, objects acting as a focal point of the room, and phases of the game.
Smaller spaces (the waiting rooms and places to wait for matchmaking) displays more instances of non-verbal communication than in large spaces (game play areas) even when no matches are being played.
Echo Games Overview
Echo Games is one of the most popular E-Sport communities in virtual reality. There has been specific interest in how VR might change the world of business and gaming. The aim of this study was to understand how a virtual community in VR functions and how it might be similar and different to how communities behave in the real world.
Sample
Virtual reality gamer (whom I will refer to as KN) has been participating in the VR community for the past 3 years. KN had been chosen because of his frequency of logging into VR as he spends nearly 15-20 hours per week in VR. This amount of time spent allowed for extended lengths of time for observation.
KN also was able to provide an in-depth look at the structure of his gaming community since he is part of a 6-person team that competes professionally in Echo Combat’s official sponsored events. KN’s team VRespawn has competed globally and won last year’s championship tournament.
Observations
KN gave me permission to follow and record him on his Twitch stream. This allowed me to be remote but also have a view of KN's actions as well as have a view through his eyes.
For 3 months I became very experienced with all of KN's interactions in VR. Because he is so connected with his team, extensive observations of his team were also able to be recorded.
Themes, Personas, & Secondary Research
From the data collection, themes began to emerge a strong persona. We reported the themes and extracted personas from the data that focused on the attitudes of the participants.
Reported Themes:
Echo Community
Team Dynamics are both about having fun and competing
Majority of Communication is through Voice Chat
Degrees of Social Presence in Echo Arena
Limited Gesture Controls Does Not Inhibit Use of Gestures
Personal Space
Personas
Based on the interviews and observations, a persona was made to summarize the team's feelings and motivations.
(While this should be studied more, I predict that this is a common psychographic among the communities of VR.)
Example Theme: Majority of Communication through Voice-chat.
Quotes about team: “There's plenty of times when we're just hanging in like a Discord call, and just talking or watching movies videos together”
“Like, [with] one of them, we only live like 10 minutes away. We've been friends for years, but we've still only met like five or six times”
[Talking about using Discord rather than using VR to hang out] “Discord is just easier to use and a lot of stuff in VR is like really slow to use. [It] doesn't work very well for just sitting there for long periods of time."
In VR, the team mainly communicates through voice chat and will rarely have virtual face to face interactions with one another.
Voice chat only seems to be a regular interaction for this group. The team has met rarely in person and they mainly socialize with one another through the voice chat tool in the Discord app.
The VR platform’s performance is a big issue for the team. This leads them to spend more time using Discord off the platform rather than using VR for socializing.
Example Theme: *Social Presence in Echo Arena:
Guiding Questions:
Based on extensive observations, it was found that non-verbal communication did exist between players under the right circumstances. This can be seen in the video.
*Social Presence:
Servotte, and et. al. (2020) refer to immersion as the technology’s ability to be believable (such as a player’s ability in Echo VR’s to move in a zero-gravity space), and immersion is broken when an event happens that will break the immersion (such as performance issues like computer lag). Presence is the feeling of the space and is influenced by the person’s emotions and social factors. Many immersion factors depend on the game’s performance, but social presence largely is reliant on a person’s own emotions and the people around them.
In a separate study, Communication Behavior in Embodied Virtual Reality, Smith and Neff (2018) measured the degree of social presence in a virtual world. This was done by comparing both physical and virtual interactions and comparing the non-verbal communication between the two participants. The results of the study showed there was little difference between social presence from the face to face interaction to the
digital avatar interaction in VR. These findings were largely based on the use of non-verbal communication such as the use of gestures, eye contact, etc.
Recommendations
If a VR developer wants to create a more socially present space in Virtual Reality, consider building a small environment with fewer degrees of movement possible. Social interaction may also be increased by having a focal point, such as a table.
VR Developers should consider the benefits of having an environment that lacks personal boundaries and has limited gestures and non-verbal communication. These limitations aren’t necessarily negative. Studies have actually showed that a VR experience actually helped improve social interactions for children with high-functioning autism. The results showed improvements of emotion recognition and social attribution. (Didehbani & et. al., 2016)
VR Developers should also be aware of the community as a whole and how tightly knit they are. This may affect adoption rates of new tools and options as a whole.
Reflection
Having a discovery project where we are looking inside the community for inspiration for new ideas was a new experience for me. This took many days to really hone into KN and his team's motivations, habits, and dynamics.
What took weeks, however, was to find the nuances of interactions such as the ones reported in this summary of the project. Finding this was an exciting discovery and it has taught me to really look into the small details of observation and there truly can be a wealth of knowledge drawn from even small interactions.
