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Introduction
A widespread shift from traditional face-to-face engagements to virtual or hybrid modalities necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated real-time interactions, communication and collaborative endeavours among individuals (Saatçi et al., 2020). Advancements in emerging technologies, exemplified by extended reality, have paved the way for more organic and immersive group meeting experiences that support a more natural way of communication. These innovations hold the potential to establish themselves as comparable, if not superior, alternatives to traditional 2D virtual collaboration (e.g. see Steinicke et al., 2020). Before the pandemic, video conferencing was a niche tool, but the shift to remote work transformed it into an essential communication standard overnight. Similarly, social virtual reality (SVR) could become widely adopted with the right technological or societal catalyst, further accelerating advancements in related technologies (Besson and Gauttier, 2024).
Even as the application and research on immersive virtual reality have increased, there seems to be less consensus among researchers on its various aspects and definitions. At the most basic level, virtual reality requires the participants to be immersed in an “interactive three-dimensional computer-generated environment” (Bryson, 1995, p. 13). Immersion in virtual reality refers to user engagement and the technological support for perceiving a shared interaction space in the metaverse (Slater, 2018). This effect is usually produced through a head-mounted display (HMD) that evokes the feeling of being present in an immersive virtual reality, where the user can interact with or manipulate objects in a virtual space (Steinicke et al., 2020). The concept of presence in the immersive space is discussed as an important mechanism to alleviate challenges associated with traditional 2D virtual communication. Presence is defined as the feeling of truly being in another reality, thus, generated by the illusion of plausibility and place (Felton and Jackson, 2022). Initial virtual reality definitions predominantly emphasised the technological aspects of the medium, such as an interactive, immersive and multisensory environment (Steuer, 1992). Given the rising accessibility of HMDs and expanding opportunities for virtual reality connectivity, it appears crucial to incorporate a social interaction perspective into existing VR definitions. In SVR multiple users can place themselves as avatars in an artificial environment and interact with each other, on various metaverse platforms (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2023). In extended reality (XR),...