Sharing Facial Cues at Different Target Positions to Support Virtual Collaboration

Virtual Reality (VR) collaboration allows users to share their emotions through visual cues placed at different locations.Various techniques have been proposed to enable VR collaborators to share their feelings with each other.However, it remains unclear how the placement of these cues affects collaboration in VR.This study explores how the location of emotional cues during a virtual collaboration task impacts users' attention, social interaction, and emotional experience.We created a VR prototype where users received their partner's emotions (neutral, happy, angry, sad and surprised) through facial expressions as emoji cues attached to different places: either their own hand, their partner's hand, or objects in the task environment.Testing these in an urban planning task, we found that the cues placed on a user's own hand attracted their partner's gaze, which improved social closeness and emotional understanding between the partners.