Remote Conference Participation in Social Virtual Worlds

Scientific conferences have long had issues with access by people without the time, money, or ability to travel. Coupled with a renewed focus on sustainability, driven by increased attention to the environmental impact of air travel, academics are looking again at online and virtual conferencing as one part of a solution to these problems. Over the past year, we have experimented with the Mozilla Hubs social virtual environment (SVE) platform to explore solutions to this problem. Our experiments have focused on leveraging live video streams of talks at traditional conferences, such as ACM CHI, ACM UIST, and IEEE VR, as the basis for creating remote experiences. While the focus has been on co-watching these live streams of the conference talks, we have experimented with casual social chat spaces and online distributed poster sessions as well. A user study was at the UIST 2019 conference focused on understanding social interactions, user experience, design aspects, and motivation of attendance, and we are using lessons learned from that study to run a larger experience at the VR 2020 conference. The UIST student showed that SVEs offered a reasonable experience for cowatching the conference talks remotely and attending the virtual poster session. In this position paper, we summarize how we are building on the lessons learned for IEEE VR 2020.