Sensing the Intentions to Speak in VR Group Discussions

Abstract

While virtual reality (VR) technologies enable remote communication through the use of 3D avatars, it is often difficult to foster engaging group discussions without addressing the limitations to the non-verbal communication among distributed participants. In this paper, we discuss a technique to detect the intentions to speak in group discussions by tapping into intricate sensor data streams from VR headsets and hand-controllers. To this end, we developed a prototype VR group discussion app equipped with comprehensive sensor data-logging functions and conducted an experiment of VR group discussions (N = 24). We used the quantitative and qualitative experimental data to analyze participants’ experiences of group discussions in relation to the temporal patterns of their different speaking intentions. We then propose a sensor-based mechanism for detecting speaking intentions by employing a sampling strategy that considers the temporal patterns of speaking intentions, and we verify the feasibility of our approach in group discussion settings.

Detecting Leadership Opportunities in Group Discussions Using Off-the-Shelf VR Headsets

“…This distinguishes it from our approach to detecting speaking intention. Unlike our previous work [ 34 ], which centered on free discussions without leaders, our current research focuses on leader-led VR group discussions in the context of a survival game scenario and proposes novel techniques for the detection of suppressed speaking intention. We have also modified our data sampling approach, adopting a more general slide window method instead of solely sampling data from the first 3 s before speaking.…”