Engagement and Quality of Experience in Remote Business Meetings: A Social VR Study

Currently, most videoconferencing technologies do not keep employees sufficiently engaged during business meetings. Recent studies have shown how extended reality (XR) technologies can help in executing remote meetings in new and possibly better ways. One important factor for meetings in e.g. Virtual Reality (VR) is avatar realism, with the assumption that photorealistic representations of users increase the engagement during meetings compared to a model-based graphical representation. However, so far only limited studies have been conducted in a real-world setting with a social virtual reality communication system in which users are represented as photorealistic avatars. Therefore, in this paper, we present a pilot study using a social VR communication system that allows employees of an organisation to meet each other from different remote office locations in The Netherlands. The users are captured with a depth camera, after which the capture is rendered in the HMD's of the users. Furthermore, the research provides a novel way to subjectively investigate the engagement and quality of experience (QoE) in social VR in real-world settings and long-term use. Our correlation analysis shows that there are strong linear relationships between the quality of communication, embodiment, immersion, social presence, and meeting-engagement. Furthermore, there are strong linear relationships between usability, quality of interaction, and quality of experience.