Remote Scientific Conferences After the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Need for Socialization Drives Preferences for Virtual Reality Meetings

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to exert influence on the scientific community: circumstances have forced academics to engage more frequently in technology-mediated activities, including their participation in remote and virtual conferences. In this article, we contemplate immersive virtual environments: we verify researchers’ motivations and constraints in the context of online conferences, and discover in what elements of such conferences researchers wish to participate in virtual reality (VR). A survey was administered using a computer-assisted web interview (CAWI) questionnaire among the sample of 1,575 academics with the POL-on database as the sampling frame. The results indicate that individuals’ contrasting needs and attitudes toward technology determine the degree to which they look favourably upon both remote conferencing and VR. Immersive virtual environments appear to satisfy the need for socialization; ordinary remote conferences fulfil the need for security and the achievement of fundamental conference goals, such as establishing collaboration and publishing research results. Conferences that are hosted remotely must be relevant to the needs of researchers and meet their discrete expectations; only then will such events prove valuable enough that researchers are willing to continue participating in them after the pandemic subsides.