Incorporating Social VR Technology in Graduate Students' Collaborative Work: A Comparative User Experience Study of "Horizon Workroom

This poster reports the objectives and design of a research study that explore the user experience of graduate
students collaborating on a hypothetical class assignment in a virtual environment through VR technologies (i.e.,
Meta Quest headset, “Horizon Workrooms”). Furthermore, participants will perform comparable tasks in two other
modalities, Zoom and in-person, to draw comparisons of their collaboration experiences. The results will imply VR
technologies' feasibility, strengths, and weaknesses in collaborative work for information-intensive tasks. Data from
the pilot session in February suggested that students were enthusiastic about learning and using VR technologies and
were highly engaged during the session. And participants thought that it was just as if not easier to perform certain
tasks in VR, such as sharing screens and co-browsing web pages. Nevertheless, participants identified several
usability problems, such as the difficulty with typing when the keyboard is properly paired, the lags in system
response, the inefficiency of using hand tracking for sophisticated tasks, etc., And all three pilot session participants
felt tired and varying degrees of motion-sickness after wearing the headset for longer than 30 minutes. Formal
testing sessions in April 2023 will reveal more findings regarding the role of VR technologies in academic
collaborative work.