Julie: Hello, we're here at the Tokyo-Edo Museum, and I am
delighted to welcome you to our talk on proxemics and social
interactions in an instrumented virtual reality workshop. This
is work that I did with my colleagues, Jie, Vino, Ayman and
Pablo at the University of Glasgow, BBC, and CWI. When we
first started this work, we wanted to understand a little
bit more about how an academic workshop could unfold in a
virtual environment. And we used Hubs, Mozilla Hubs where I'm
speaking to you from today, to actually create our workshop and
deliver this event, we wanted to understand how the environment
design the virtual reality affordances, and the kind of
design of the program could work to deliver this event. One of
the interesting things about Mozilla Hubs is that because
it's open source, we can actually instrument this with
logging code to get a very high level of detailed tracking and
instrumentation within the environment to do a quantitative
analysis. We combined this with a qualitative analysis through
interviews after the event to understand how the event worked,
and how the virtual environment worked as well. Using this data
set, we were able to create a number of different
visualizations, which you can see in the paper. But for
example, this one where we looked at Hall's proxemic zones,
you can kind of see how we could evaluate how people maintained
personal distance and how they stood next to each other in
different parts of the event. So for example, here comparing the
keynote session to the breakout room, we can actually see a real
difference in how people maintained their distance in the
personal space and social space. And these two different types of
social activities. We could also generate visualizations like
this one, where we see a heat map and a bird's eye view of the
outdoor meetup space. And we can see things like how people use
different parts of the space. So for example, this kind of
pattern on the floor, which was a decal in the virtual
environment here, which actually people avoided while they were
walking around in the virtual space, and we can see how the
design of the virtual environment actually changed the
way how people moved through it and use the space. We had a few
key takeaways that I wanted to highlight during this talk. But
you can of course, read the full analysis in our paper. But
first, I wanted to highlight that proxemic interactions are
congruent with those in physical environments. But VEs are
actually not constrained by physics. So even though we could
think about halls proxemic zones quantitatively, we also found a
new dimension, for example, flying in the virtual
environment, where we can actually have new ways of
creating personal space in a virtual environment that aren't
possible in the physical. We also wanted to highlight that
our instrumented approach can provide insights into the effect
of environment, textures, shapes, and design. So we drew
some inspiration from things like urban theory and urban
space design. We could also think about more creative ways
of designing virtual environments, with changing
environments or automatically generating environments based on
these quantitative results. And finally, that quantitative data
can answer interesting questions on social behaviors, such as
group formation, social translucence, and social cues,
we were able to understand how some of these behaviors could be
captured in a virtual environment, and understood
quantitatively, to then have qualitative improvements in
social interaction. One of the most exciting contributions as
well as that all of the code and data, and the scripts that we
use to analyze our results are available as an open source
resource on GitHub. So you can see our code, our data, and all
of the how the visualizations were generated for this paper in
that repository as part of this paper. And that's available in
the digital library and on GitHub. So thank you very much
for your time. And we are very happy to take questions. And of
course, you can always contact us after this talk. If you have
additional questions. You can also find all of our open source
resources here at our GitHub. Thank you.
Ayman: Amazing and four minutes and 45 seconds; perfect.
Vino: Very well done...brillant. Julie: Oh Snap! Pablo: It's amazing!