“Let’s Jump into More Creative Avatars and Take this Brainstorm to the Flying Platform:” Playful Prototypes of VR Meeting Support Tools

Most videoconferencing technologies presently struggle to keep people engaged during team meetings. Recent research points to the potential of social virtual and extended reality (VR/XR) technologies to transform remote meetings, offering innovative approaches through the design of novel meeting tools. This pictorial presents the design of five such prototypes of VR meeting support tools: conversation visualization, embodied affinity signaling, tools for avatar and space modulation, and time management. Deployed in a custom-built Mozilla Hubs environment, this toolkit was tested with five expert user teams in a two-fold study: researcher-moderated VR workshops (N=28) and unmoderated VR meetings (N=40). In this pictorial, the focus is on the design of the prototypes, with highlights of select results from participants’ feedback and discussion of the perceived merit of the prototypes’ design in supporting meeting interactions.