Beyond the screen: insights on social and spatial affordances of virtual reality conferencing platforms

Abstract

In today’s digital society, remote collaboration is increasingly desirable but also challenging. Virtual Reality (VR) offers a promising complement to traditional videoconferencing by presenting embodied avatars and shared 3D workspaces that can enhance social presence and spatial coordination. This paper investigates the spatial and social affordances of contemporary VR meeting platforms for everyday remote collaboration. We report on two mixed-methods case studies with existing teams (N 1 = 16; N 2 = 9) using five commercial VR meeting applications over multiple sessions. Combining questionnaires with focus groups and observations, we examine how specific affordances—spatial audio, proxemics, avatar customisation and personalisation, and shared boards and artefacts—appear to reshape floor negotiation, deictic reference, and group cohesion. Our findings indicate that VR meetings can foster richer engagement and a stronger sense of “being together” than 2D tools, particularly for divergence-heavy activities such as brainstorming and early design critique. At the same time, we identify three recurring clusters of issues that currently limit VR’s viability for everyday meetings: setup complexity, constrained movement and interaction fidelity, and asymmetric participation between headset and desktop users. We translate these insights into a task-by-modality mapping and design recommendations that can help practitioners decide when to adopt VR, when to rely on 2D tools, and how to combine them in hybrid workflows.