Focus Group on Social Virtual Reality in Social Virtual Reality: Effects on Emotion and Self-Awareness

Abstract

Social Virtual Reality (VR) platforms enable multiple users to be present together in the same virtual environment (VE) and interact with each other in this space. These platforms are used in different application areas including teaching and learning, conferences, and meetings. To improve the engagement, safety, and overall positive experience in such platforms it is important to understand the effect they have on users’ emotional states and self-awareness while being in the VE. In this work, we present a focus group study where we dis-cussed users’ opinions about social VR and we ran the focus group in a social VR platform created in Hubs by Mozilla. Our primary goal was to investigate users’ emotional states and self-awareness while using this platform. We measured these effects using positive and negative affect schedule (PANAS) and Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ). The experiment involved 12 adult participants who were volunteers from around the world with previous experience of VR.