Content area
Purpose
Social virtual reality (SVR) has emerged as a solution for the facilitation of remote and distributed teamwork, promising to overcome challenges faced in virtual 2D communication channels. The purpose of this study is to systematically review empirical articles dealing with the application of SVR with head-mounted displays (HMDs) in teams.
Design/methodology/approach
This study reviewed 40 empirical papers on teamwork that address the application of SVR using HMD in teams. The authors present results from the extracted data and identify themes that indicate the current state of research in this field.
Findings
Based on data obtained from the journal articles, the authors identified three themes underlying current research. They are features and applications of SVR technology, collaboration dynamics and team performance in SVR and educational and professional training and learning. The results show that SVR enhances team collaboration and collaborative learning.
Practical implications
SVR can aid in improving teamwork and team outcomes. In its current stage, SVR is complementary to 2D technology and not likely to replace traditional tools. Findings suggest that the technology is promising for collaboration and learning in organisations, especially in collaborative design tasks and simulations.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first studies to look at research emerging from the nascent area of SVR and summarise the current state of research. This study provides managerial implications and identifies future research areas for SVR in teamwork and learning.
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), embodied avatars provide a unique representation of users by closely replicating their real-world appearances and behaviours in real time, thereby enhancing the authenticity and engagement of virtual collaboration. These avatars are specifically designed to convey nonverbal and emotional cues – including gestures, facial expressions and body language (Waltemate et al., 2018).
Of note, there are different definitions of accessing and using immersive spaces with varying degrees of immersion (Abbas et al., 2023). In our paper, we define SVR as a synthetic computer-mediated environment that enables real-time simulation and multi-sensory human interactions. It emphasises the utility of social interactions within its domain and provides an immersive experience of being in a 3D virtual space through HMDs. The team members have to wear an HMD to insulate themselves from their immediate physical environment and immerse themselves in the computer-generated one.
The main commercial application of this technology has been in the multi-user gaming industry, and now organisations are finding applications for promoting team-based activities such as collaboration among distributed members (Aufegger and Elliott-Deflo, 2022), learning and training (Xu and Dai, 2022), leadership and decision-making (Aebersold et al., 2020). This technology helps organisations to enhance teamwork by increasing team member’s social presence and sense of reality. Notably, technological novices also seem to get used to the metaverse quickly, which is accompanied by satisfied meetings and the feeling of actually being a team through the embodied 3D avatars (Grabowski et al., 2024).
When scanning through journal articles for the current review, we noticed that while some papers claim that their subject matter is virtual reality in teams, the technology used in the study is non-immersive technology such as desktop applications, which do not come under the ambit of SVR. It is important to make this distinction, as SVR gives participants a feeling of immersion, presence and interactivity (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2023) which other technologies cannot. Going forward, we need to differentiate SVR research from other virtual team research. Although the field is still in its nascent stages, research studies that aim to understand the dynamics and effects of the usage of such tools are emerging fast.
As technology progresses and the adoption of SVR in organisational teams increases, it is important for researchers to consolidate the results of research in SVR adoption in teams and explicitly manage the way forward. The objective of our structured literature review is to present a snapshot of the current state of research on the use of SVR in teams. We highlight what researchers in the field are studying and consolidate their findings so that future researchers identify gaps as well as potential problems with the current theories and methodologies. This is one of the first reviews written about the application of SVR in teams specifically focusing on the use of HMDs.
Methodology for SLR
We decided to use the databases Scopus and Web of Science, as it is extensive and covers journals related to this field of research. We used the Google Scholar search engine for conducting a forward search on the articles we filtered.
The next step was to identify the keywords to ensure that all papers relevant to our search area could be identified during the database search. The following keywords were used to conduct the search:
Virtual team” or “remote team” or “distributed team” or “immersive team” and “teamwork” or “team process” or “collaboration” or “communication” or “meeting” or “coordination” or “management” and “virtual reality” or “augmented reality” or “immersive” or “immersion” or “metaverse” or “extended reality” or “social virtual reality.
The search resulted in 884 papers. We excluded 299 papers after the initial search based on the following exclusion criteria. Non-English papers were excluded as well as conference papers, book chapters, posters or review papers. We could not identify any review papers that dealt exclusively with the application of SVR in team contexts.
The resulting set of 585 papers was equally split among the authors, and each author read through the title and abstract to filter papers based on the inclusion criterion. We decided to exclude 507 papers that did not directly deal with the use or application of SVR technology in teams, where team members have an immersive experience using HMD. We removed papers on “virtual reality” and collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that used 2D technology. We also retained the papers based on dyads where the focus of the research was collaborative working. This resulted in a total of 77 papers which were split equally among the authors and completely read. A total of 41 papers were dropped from the SLR after the full paper was read, as it had not been clear from the abstract and title whether the paper dealt with SVR in teams with the use of HMDs. Four more papers were added to the final list of SLR, after a forward search on the full-papers.
A total of 40 papers were included in the final SLR list. The authors read through the complete paper and extracted information for the SLR. Themes for classifying the main research objective of the papers were proposed based on the reading of the full paper by each author. All possible themes related to each paper were suggested. The authors discussed the themes and agreed on the final list of themes.
Results
In this section, we present a summary of the data extracted from the final list of papers in the SLR.
Publication trend
There were very few papers on the application of SVR in teams in the early part of the 2000s. One of the first papers that we came across, published two decades ago, used a CVE to train remote workers in shared manipulation of objects (Roberts et al., 2003). According to Google Trends search, there was a significant growth of research into virtual teamwork, which was primarily based on synchronous and asynchronous communication through 2D. The technology and cost restrictions of 3D restricted papers till 2015. After 2020, the development and innovative uses of 3D technology in different industries resulted in doubling the number of papers published.
Methodology and method
We found a high number of papers in the SLR using mixed (15 papers) and quantitative methods (15 papers), followed by qualitative methods (11 papers). Most of the quantitative papers used an experimental design (11 papers). Mixed and qualitative methods are highly suitable for capturing nuances about the context and social interactions among team members. The purpose of our review was to present the state of current research in the field of SVR in teams. As the research questions that we posed were broad, we wanted to include as many journal articles as possible in the SLR (Snyder, 2019). So our SLR contains articles following different types of methodologies, and we could not use a single quality assessment protocol for assessing the quality of the papers. We assessed the journal articles on quality by asking the following questions:
Does the article state the theoretical underpinnings of the research conducted? Does the article state the research question?
Does the article describe the sampling method and sample? How was the sampling done?
Based on the assessment, we classified papers as having low, medium and high levels of quality. We found that 20 of the papers had a medium level of quality, 2 papers had high quality and 18 papers had low level of quality. However, classification of the papers as medium and low level of quality can be ascribed more to sampling method and small sample size. In line with the objective of our review, we did not remove any of the papers from the SLR.
Industry
The medical industry was one of the first to adopt and implement the use of VR technology to train medical personnel in teamwork during critical operations such as surgery (Paiva et al., 2018), and emergency response (Stone et al., 2017). In architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), SVR is used to support collaborative design (Astaneh Asl and Dossick, 2022; Berg and Vance, 2017); in medicine, it supports emergency and surgery training (Paiva et al., 2018; Stone et al., 2017) as well as training of multidisciplinary teamwork (De la Vega et al., 2022; D’Errico, 2021, Sadeghi et al., 2021). Other industries such as design (Shen et al., 2010), manufacturing (Berg and Vance, 2017) and project teams in knowledge work (Owens et al., 2011) have started adopting the use of SVR for critical scenarios that cannot be (or are too costly to be) replicated in real life or for overcoming the challenges of distributed teamwork. Simulations of emergency scenarios are popular use cases of SVR in other industries as well, for example, to increase emergency preparedness in industrial plants (Xu and Dai, 2022), for disaster response training (Symeonidis et al., 2023) and in the military (Berardino and Tucker IV, 2020). An example of innovative use of SVR is in the manufacturing industry where welders are trained in welding skills using SVR at a lower cost than physical training (Stone et al., 2011). Studies today examine the benefits of SVR to improve teamwork (Berardino and Tucker IV, 2020; Longo et al., 2019), communication and collaboration (Agnès et al., 2022; Anderson et al., 2017) and are industry agnostic.
An application of SVR in teams, in education, has been for imparting training and skill development to work in global virtual teams (Anderson et al., 2017). Some of the papers are the results of collaborative work between industry and academic institutions, which examine the application of SVR in student-based teams before possible application in the field (Hudson et al., 2019).
Characteristics of social virtual reality experience
The feeling of “being present” in a traditional VR is measured by the extent to which the participants experience three characteristics, namely, immersion, interactivity and presence in the virtual environment (Walsh and Pawlowski, 2002). Based on the data extracted from the SLR, we identified that authors used other criteria as well to assess how participants experience SVR. We added “information sharing” as a characteristic of SVR, as 25 of the papers indicated that it was used in some form to evaluate the SVR experience. For example, papers from the education sector focused on team learning and transfer of concepts (D’Errico, 2021; Šašinka et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2020). Papers from other industries focused on the efficiency of knowledge sharing (Santos-Torres et al., 2022) and SVR design to improve knowledge sharing (Torro and Pirkkalainen, 2023). Articles also examined what kind of information was being shared. Information shared in the SVR can be verbal or non-verbal (Moore and Geuss, 2020). Verbal information can be in the form of text in word bubbles (Symeonidis et al., 2023), in chat (Anderson et al., 2017) or expressed through speech. One of the advantages of SVR is the ability to capture and convey the non-verbal behaviour of team members with the team. Some of the papers examined how these non-verbal actions are captured and how they impact the effectiveness of the conversation or meeting (Moore and Geuss, 2020).
In Table 1, we detail the four characteristics of SVR, alongside the outcomes and key findings reported in select papers. It is important to note that these characteristics did not serve as independent variables in all the studies reviewed. For instance, in some papers, they functioned as precursors to outcomes such as feedback (Horvat et al., 2024), usability and team performance (Narasimha et al., 2019). In other studies, these characteristics emerged as outcomes influenced by antecedents like different types of representation (Marques et al., 2023). It is also important to note that the four characteristics may not be equally important for all social interactions in SVR.
Apart from the four characteristics mentioned above, there were a few more characteristics which were used in articles to assess or describe the SVR experience. As they found mention only in one or two articles at the most, we did not add these characteristics to our list. Nevertheless, we mention them here, as they are crucial for team researchers to bear in mind. Ease of use of software from the perspective of the participants (Xu and Dai, 2022), security in meetings (Syed et al., 2022), context setting (Aebersold et al., 2020), hardware and software required (Diaz et al., 2013; Stone et al., 2017) and physical response or dis/comfort of the participants (Xu and Dai, 2022; Longo et al., 2019) were also used to describe SVR.
Social virtual reality theoretical underpinnings
Many of the papers did not specify the theoretical underpinnings of the work. The theories that were mentioned in the journal articles, governed the social interactions among team members or the interaction between technological capabilities and the team members. A large proportion of the papers that did mention a theory relied on the social presence theory and its derivatives (seven papers). Social presence is defined as “people’s perceptions of a person’s being real or being there” (Lowenthal, 2010, pg. 4). Papers relying on social presence theory examined the elements in SVR that enhanced team communication (Marques et al., 2023; Santos-Torres et al., 2022) and the mechanisms by which SVR influences presence and productivity in a virtual setting (Aufegger and Elliott-Deflo, 2022; Oprean et al., 2018).
Research by Torro and Pirkkalainen (2023) explored how SVR can help facilitate social exchange among team members to design better SVR. Owens et al. (2011) used the socio-technical systems theory to analyse how social elements and technological capabilities interact to impact team members and team outcomes. Other theories cited in the papers are complexity theory (Nah et al., 2017) and learning theory (De la Vega et al., 2022; Coyne et al., 2018).
Main research themes identified
Research themes and findings in this area encompass a broad range of topics, particularly concerning the technology of SVR, and its impact on communication, collaboration and learning. We identified three overarching themes that described the focus of each of our studies. They are features and employment of SVR technology, collaboration dynamics and team performance and education, professional training and learning in teams. It is important to note that review papers do not belong to one theme exclusively. Given the area of research, technology and teamwork are broad themes that are featured in all selected articles. Papers under Theme 1 focus on the features and design of the SVR environment that will aid teamwork and learning, while papers under Theme 2 and 3 focus on teamwork, team dynamics and learning within an SVR environment. The themes, indicative papers and findings are summarised in Table 2.
Theme 1 – features and employment of virtual reality technology
Theme 1 encompasses studies looking into acceptance, adoption (Abramczuk et al., 2023; Owens et al., 2011) and overall experience with SVR (Hudson et al., 2019). Khojasteh and Won (2021) studied the adaptation to collaboration in SVR over time and found an increase in the comfort of use whereas results on presence were mixed. For example, engaging with objects within the virtual environment can play an important role in enhancing immersion in the virtual surroundings (Hudson et al., 2019). Moreover, Hudson and colleagues (2019) indicated that both social interaction and immersion enhanced user’s perception of SVR. The key feature and employment of SVR technology can be summarised that elevating the level of immersion generally heightens the user’s sense of presence, referring to their subjective illusion of being present in the meeting space alongside others (Khojasteh and Won, 2021). Aufegger and Elliott-Deflo (2022) concluded three features that are important to shape SVR experiences usable, accessible and safe VR applications, customisable VR environment configurations and role and team-dependent work tools that foster productivity.
In essence, the interplay of technological and social factors in the metaverse can positively influence behaviour, which in turn can have a positive impact on various outcomes (Owens et al., 2011). Despite these advancements, operational challenges persist. Users reported difficulties with the physical aspects of certain SVR hardware, such as discomfort from wearing heavy or ill-fitting HMD (Abramczuk et al., 2023) and headaches and eye strain from using the HMD when trying to read text (Bonfert et al., 2023). In certain cases, ill-fitting HMD left large gaps between the wearer’s face and the device (Khojasteh and Won, 2021), thus not effectively isolating the wearer from her immediate surroundings.
Theme 2 – collaboration dynamics and team performance
Research within this theme investigates the extent to which SVR improves team performance or explores the team-level factors that improve SVR interactions. Papers which answer the former part of this research question usually compare team performance while using SVR with that of team performance while using 2D technology (Khalid et al., 2021). Team performance includes objective measures of effectiveness and efficiency, along with decision-making and reflective measures of satisfaction and team viability. Team member preference for SVR or 2D seems to be dependent on the task – a good example being the Abramczuk et al.’s (2023) study which found that teams preferred 2D technology to complete work and SVR for team building activities. The difficulties in exchanging information and taking notes made 2D more attractive than SVR when completing tasks. Team members working in emergency situations felt that it was easier to communicate and navigate when using 2D shared workspaces (Santos-Torres et al., 2022). Abramczuk and colleagues attributed this selective preference for 2D to the fact that most members who participated in the study had no prior experience in VR. As team members experience with SVR increases, we may see a change in this preference (Berg and Vance, 2017). A few papers also examined the role of SVR in enhancing team decision-making in the military (Berardino and Tucker, 2020) and design (Berg and Vance, 2017). A few papers indicate that “fun”, “presence” and “naturalness” of team interactions improved with SVR (Yigitbas et al., 2023). Studies on the viability of teamwork in SVR have mixed outcomes. In some studies, team members’ experiences improved interpersonal connections while using SVR (Coyne et al., 2018) and became more comfortable with the technology (Narasimha et al., 2019). However, in other studies, team members were deterred from using SVR because of challenges related to HMD and hardware usability (Aufegger and Elliott-Deflo, 2022).
Papers which examine which team-level factors improve functioning in the SVR examined team characteristics such as team composition (Abramczuk et al., 2023; Moore and Geuss, 2020) and structure (Agnès et al., 2022). The other elements which emerged as important factors in influencing the outcomes in SVR are members’ familiarity with the tools and software used (Berg and Vance, 2017), interaction between members (Hudson et al., 2019) and phase of design (Horvat et al., 2024). Agnès et al. (2022) compared how the asymmetry of technology usage in teams, i.e. one member using a laptop and another using SVR, affected team performance in creative tasks and found no difference compared to symmetric conditions.
There were papers which dealt with how SVR facilitated multi-sensory social interactions and how it impacted team performance. Aebersold and colleagues (2020) found that when team members participated in an immersive Mount Everest summit climb (performed individually) and later participated in a team exercise to climb Mount Everest, they performed better than the control teams. The immersive experience made the team members better appreciate the gravity of their situation and the impact of their decisions on survival.
Theme 3 – educational and professional training and learning
Studies on SVR in individual and collaborative learning follow mostly qualitative or mixed method design and often seek to evaluate or improve specific training or education programmes. Research questions revolve around the feasibility of SVR for collaborative learning and enhanced learning outcomes. Studies often compare SVR with conventional learning settings and focus on the application of SVR for learning in diverse fields such as medicine, AEC and design.
SVR offers a cost-effective way to simulate medical emergency responses and facilitates interdisciplinary learning and collaboration under pressure in medical team training (Paiva et al., 2018; Stone et al., 2017). Overall, it provides cost-effective solutions for simulation and training (Longo et al., 2019). SVR training enhances interprofessional collaboration and collaborative learning, the appreciation of different perspectives in multidisciplinary teamwork (De la Vega et al., 2022), situation awareness and decision-making in both field and control room settings for emergency response teams (Symeonidis et al., 2023).
Although in comparison, results for learning outcomes of traditional 2D and SVR are mixed, learners rate SVR experiences as more authentic (Singh et al., 2020) and engaging (Wang et al., 2022; Xu and Dai, 2022). Yigitbas et al. (2023) found that users enjoy collaborating in an SVR environment more, although they experience disadvantages compared to traditional settings in software design (Yigitbas et al., 2023). In anatomy learning, application of SVR increased knowledge scores compared to traditional forms of learning (Bork et al., 2021). For the acquisition of practical knowledge, SVR-integrated welding training showed better results in terms of transfer percentage, material consumption and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional methods (Stone et al., 2011).
In summary, these findings indicate that SVR is increasingly being integrated into various educational and professional training contexts, offering enhanced engagement and collaborative opportunities. SVR is being deployed in training teams to manage emergencies.
Implications for future research
Based on the themes derived in the previous section, we discuss the implications for practitioners and directions of future research in the field of SVR. The papers reviewed in this SLR indicate that immersive social virtual technology can aid team work in different situations.
Features and application of social virtual reality technology
As SVR technology is still emerging and in an infancy state, the research is too. The focus lies on its benefits for interactions in the metaverse and learning. SVR seems to enhance virtual interactions, offering a sense of presence crucial for teamwork and improving learning by creating interactive environments. However, the scarce literature on how virtual multi-sensory interactions might be improving virtual communication leaves room for further exploration. This gap becomes especially pertinent when considering the transformation in communication methods witnessed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The widespread adoption of video conferences has set a new baseline in virtual communication. The interest in SVR has risen in the last ten years and more research on this topic is published, highlighting a growing trend which in turn seems to predict even more upcoming research in this field. With increasingly sophisticated hardware and software, possibilities of virtual interactions and collaborations will emerge, concluding that there will most likely be more research on the effects of remote SVR meetings in the near future. Virtual worlds are pivotal in the study of SVR, as they offer a new interaction space to research social interactions and behaviours (e.g. Girvan, 2018). These environments allow for the systematic manipulation of variables, enabling researchers to observe their impact on user experience, engagement and social dynamics. Furthermore, virtual worlds provide a unique platform to investigate social presence and identity formation, shedding light on how immersive interactions can mirror or augment real-world social phenomena at large (Besson and Gauttier, 2024).
Apparently, how users are introduced to SVR technology also seems to be of relevance. As novices to the metaverse, future research should continue to investigate how to optimise the acclimatisation of novices to the metaverse and the new interaction setting (Grabowski et al., 2024). Furthermore, the accessibility of SVR technology has been pointed out as an important aspect. HMDs are pricey, not widely available and the software is also in its infancy state, making it less accessible. In sum, despite the accessibility challenges and the infancy of software development, SVR technology offers significant potential for fostering collaboration and teamwork in shared virtual spaces, made possible by HMDs.
Collaboration dynamics and performance
As technology adoption increases, there is an anticipated rise in studies focusing on collaboration and teamwork within virtual environments. The comparison to remote meetings and video conferencing will continue till we fine-tune how SVR can complement or replace 2D technology. This exploration will be crucial for understanding the full potential of SVR in reshaping workplace collaboration and team performance. An essential mechanism influencing the efficacy of immersive collaboration via SVR involves interaction through embodied avatars (Nowak and Fox, 2018). Avatars in the metaverse are discussed to enhance fruitful collaboration by enabling more effective and lifelike communication, in particular for self-avatars (Pan and Steed, 2017). By replicating real-world behaviours and nonverbal cues, avatars provide a richer interaction experience, reducing misunderstandings and improving coordination (Waltemate et al., 2018). Future research should investigate how avatars can foster a sense of presence and cohesion among team members specifically and underlying fruitful interaction more broadly.
Moreover, future research should examine how characteristics of SVR (Table 1) can enhance collaboration across different use cases. One potential area of interest is the mode of information sharing in situations, such as emergency response, and military space operations which is currently constrained by traditional technology capability. Multiple channels such as text in chat, word bubbles and non-verbal communication might be useful for communicating specific kinds of information to increase situational awareness and decrease response time.
Our review indicates that 3D technology may not be the most suitable technology to use in all contexts though there are instances where SVR enhances teamwork better than 2D. This finding needs to be read with caution, as results might change when novice users of technology become more adapted to it, or when technology becomes less cumbersome and easy to use. Therefore, future research should not only examine contexts where SVR will be effective but also how to introduce and acclimatise team members to SVR.
Another area that needs to be addressed is the conflict between subjective measures and objective measures of teamwork and performance. SVR seems to be having a positive impact on how people experience their work. Objective measures of performance do not seem to be improved by the use of SVR and seem to be equivalent to or lower than when using 2D technology. This is a concern for team research, as subjective measures are important for team viability, while objective measures are important for demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of team processes.
Educational and professional training and learning
In accordance with studies on individual learning, the benefits of SVR learning environments are situation-specific; for example, SVR is effective in training situations that afford spatial and visual learning or responses to stressful and difficult situations (Jensen and Konradsen, 2018). As our review shows that research revolves around the evaluation and improvement of learning platforms, we expect studies on situation-specific learning to continue.
In our review, we found research is focused on the design of SVR environments for effective learning, including a trend towards the incorporation of this technology in educational settings. For example, Makransky and Petersen (2021) suggest that increased immersion enhances cognitive processing and emotional engagement, thereby improving learning outcomes. SVR is used in training areas where it is not possible or too expensive to recreate realistic situations such as emergencies, disaster training and team-based medical interventions, providing a cost-effective approach to collaborative learning. The immersive nature of SVR allows for more engaging and focused learning experiences, potentially leading to better retention and understanding of content.
We found many studies concentrating on the technological and design aspects such as implementation and enhancement of virtual learning environments. Other research compares SVR to traditional training and simulation programs, exploring questions related to learning effectiveness. SVR learning environments provide spaces for collaborative learning – the setting is inherently social. Once the technology is more widely adopted, research questions will increasingly focus on aspects of communication and collaboration. In this area, the potential for gamification of learning within VR seems to offer a flexible and interactive approach, suggesting that future studies will likely be focused on the integration of these elements to improve educational outcomes.
Limitations
The scope of any research should be informed by the limitations and constraints under which it was performed. Our review was restricted to empirical research papers written in English and published in journals in Scopus and Web of Science. The research designs of the papers we reviewed were mostly exploratory and based on small groups. The conclusions we draw from the papers are indicative of trends in this area of research, as research and technology in this area are nascent.
Conclusion
This paper presents a review of empirical literature on the application of SVR in team settings. Our paper contributes to the literature by offering a definition for SVR in teams, summarising and classifying the review papers under three main themes and identifying the implications for future research. Our review indicates that SVR complements current technology for virtual teamwork and was found to be effective in improving collaborative teamwork and learning. Future research on SVR design could focus on ways to improve multisensory interactions and remote SVR meetings. Research to improve team collaboration and training could focus on avatar influence, identifying contexts where SVR is more effective in aiding teamwork and collaborative learning.
Characteristics of SVR experience
| SVR characteristic | Team outcome | Findings |
|---|---|---|
| Immersion | Presence Oprean et al. (2018) | Immersion increases feeling of presence |
| Interaction | SVR experience Hudson et al. (2019) | Interaction with the virtual environment improves satisfaction with the SVR |
| Presence | Information sharing Anderson et al. (2017) | Presence was effective for non-verbal communication |
| Information sharing | Learning Bork et al. (2021) | SVR increases student understanding but also increased experienced mental effort |
Source: Created by authors
Themes and indicative papers
| Theme | Sub-themes | Indicative papers from SLR list | Findings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Features and application of VR technology | Overall SVR experience |
Abramczuk et al. (2023); Aufegger and Elliott-Deflo (2022); Hudson et al. (2019); Khojasteh and Won (2021); Owens et al. (2011) | Comfort of use increases with experience |
| Collaboration dynamics and team performance | Advantage of SVR over 2D technology |
Khalid et al. (2021); Santos-Torres et al. (2022) |
Advantage of SVR over 2D is context specific |
| Educational and professional training and learning | Design of learning platforms |
De la Vega et al. (2022); Paiva et al. (2018) |
Cost-effective simulations |
Source: Created by authors
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