Verisimilitude as Boon and Bane: How People Initiate Opportunistic Interactions at Professional Events in Social VR

2025-07-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the absence of opportunistic interactions—unstructured, serendipitous exchanges—in online professional settings, investigating how users initiate such interactions in social VR. Through participatory observation and retrospective interviews with 16 experienced social VR attendees, we conducted a qualitative study revealing the critical role of nonverbal “verisimilitude” across three interaction phases: availability detection, attention capture, and ice-breaking. Results show that while technical simplification improves interface usability, it concurrently erodes the natural behavioral cues essential for spontaneous engagement—yielding a design paradox. Users dynamically calibrate their behavior based on perceived verisimilitude, yet lack systematic support for doing so effectively. Based on these findings, we propose design principles for social VR platforms that balance verisimilitude and efficiency, offering both theoretical grounding and practical guidelines for facilitating high-quality opportunistic interactions in professional contexts.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Opportunistic interactions-the unstructured exchanges that emerge as individuals become aware of each other's presence-are essential for relationship building and information sharing in everyday life. Yet, fostering effective opportunistic interactions has proven challenging, especially at professional events that have increasingly transitioned from in person to online formats. In the current paper, we offer an in-depth qualitative account of how people initiate opportunistic interactions in social VR. Our participants consisted of 16 individuals with ongoing experience attending VR-mediated events in their professional communities. We conducted extensive observations with each participant during one or more events they attended. We also interviewed them after every observed event, obtaining self-reflections on their attempts to navigate opportunistic interactions with others. Our analysis revealed that participants sought to understand the extent to which social VR preserved the real-world meanings of various nonverbal cues, which we refer to as verisimilitude. We detailed the unique connections between a person's perceived verisimilitude and their social behaviors at each of the three steps toward initiating opportunistic interactions: availability recognition, attention capture, and ice-breaking. Across these steps, the VR platform typically replaces complex social mechanisms with feasible technical ones in order to function, thereby altering the preconditions necessary for a nonverbal cue's social meanings to remain intact. We identified a rich set of strategies that participants developed to assess verisimilitude and act upon it, while also confirming a lack of systematic knowledge guiding their practices. Based on these findings, we provide actionable insights for social VR platform design that can best support the initiation of opportunistic interactions for professional purposes.

Problem

• How social VR enables opportunistic interactions at professional events
• Impact of verisimilitude on nonverbal cues in VR social behaviors
• Strategies for initiating interactions in VR-mediated professional settings

Innovation

• Social VR preserves real-world nonverbal cues
• Verisimilitude influences three interaction steps
• VR replaces social mechanisms with technical ones