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We have explored the effects of sharing manipulated heart rate feedback in collaborative virtual environments. In our study, we created two types of different virtual environments (active and passive) with different levels of interactions and provided three levels of manipulated heart rate feedback (decreased, unchanged, and increased). We measured the effects of manipulated feedback on Social Presence, affect, physical heart rate, and overall experience. We noticed a significant effect of the manipulated heart rate feedback in affecting scariness and nervousness. The perception of the collaborator's valance and arousal was also affected where increased heart rate feedback perceived as a higher valance and lower arousal. Increased heart rate feedback decreased the real heart rate. The type of virtual environments had a significant effect on social presence, heart rate, and affect where the active environment had better performances across these measurements. We discuss the implications of this and directions for future research.

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Hyperscanning is a technique which simultaneously records the neural activity of two or more people. This is done using one of several neuroimaging methods, such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The use of hyperscanning has seen a dramatic rise in recent years to monitor social interactions between two or more people. Similarly, there has been an increase in the use of virtual reality (VR) for collaboration, and an increase in the frequency of social interactions being carried out in virtual environments (VE). In light of this, it is important to understand how interactions function within VEs, and how they can be enhanced to improve their quality in a VE. In this paper, we present some of the work that has been undertaken in the field of social neuroscience, with a special emphasis on hyperscanning. We also cover the literature detailing the work that has been carried out in the human–computer interaction domain that addresses remote collaboration. Finally, we present a way forward where these two research domains can be combined to explore how monitoring the neural activity of a group of participants in VE could enhance collaboration among them.

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