Understanding Social Interactions in Reality Versus Virtuality

Immersive realities enable social interactions that are radically different from traditional communication technologies, but how we experience immersion together is not yet indistinguishable from face-to-face interactions. Some social signals are not stable across realities, may change in semantics, or are missing all together. Understanding how social signals impact behaviours and experiences of social connection in immersive environments is key to creating experiences that are meaningful, satisfying, and productive. We completed a lab study where 6 groups of 6 participants (N=36) completed co-located social tasks in an instrumented face-to-face environment and its digital twin, creating a rich open dataset of 1.8 million rows across 45 columns. Our quantitative results demonstrate the stability of position as a social signal, measure lower social synchronisation in XR compared to face-to-face, and propose a method for bench marking XR against face-to-face interactions. This enables direct quantitative comparisons between experiences of co-located physical and virtual interactions for the first time.