Do empathic tendencies predict a state empathy and social presence in VR? A study on social experience during a collaborative VR task.

Abstract

Social platforms that allow people to interact with each other through shared immersive virtual reality (Social VR) are gaining more and more popularity. They allow users to transfer the social part of many aspects of life, such as leisure, travel, education, and collaborative work, into the virtual space since such communication is much closer to face-to-face communication than any previous social platform. As a result, it becomes critical to study the factors that can hinder the social experience of VR. The key concepts for evaluating social experience in VR are social presence and empathy. The former relates to the perceived realness of other people in VR, and the latter relates to how susceptible users are to others' emotional states. Our work aimed to determine if individual differences in a person's empathic tendencies affect their experience of social presence and understanding of others' emotions in VR. To achieve it, we designed a laboratory experiment followed by constructing regression models in which empathic tendencies were analysed as predictors of social presence and empathic accuracy. An additional predictor was the condition of the experiment that allows people to customize their avatars. With this predictor, we tested the hypothesis that conveying more social cues through the avatar's appearance could increase social presence. The uniqueness of the experiment was that it was run simultaneously by two researchers with two participants who interacted with each other only in a virtual room. The participants had to solve a collaborative spatial puzzle, which requires an assessment of the partner's perspective on a physical object in order to solve it. Unlike most experiments on empathy and social presence, this task required focusing on a third object and not on a partner, which is more in line with the realities of working in a team. The results did not find a statistically significant association between empathic tendencies and social presence or a better understanding of one's partners' emotions during this task. The ability to express oneself through avatar customization was also not significantly related to the increased social presence in dyads.