In recent years, the use of remote meetings at work has become more common. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of videoconferencing business meetings increased dramatically (Agostino et al., 2020; Waizenegger et al., 2020; Bennett et al., 2021). In response to government measures to combat the virus, a broad range of workers were forced to work remotely. After the global pandemic ended and the measures loosened, many of these workers retained their right to work away from the office (Gould et al., 2023). In the context of business meetings, this resulted in a large increase in the use of 2D videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams (Standaert et al., 2022).

Remote business meetings offer several advantages. Firstly, remote meetings allow for greater flexibility in terms of scheduling and accommodating different time zones (Mohamedbhai et al., 2021; Standaert et al., 2022), given that participants can join from anywhere with an internet connection. Remote meetings can also optimise efficiency by reducing time spent on extraneous activities such as commuting to a workplace. Consequently, this also lowers the environmental impact associated with in-person meetings, concurrently resulting in cost savings related to travel. Lastly, remote working may also facilitate work-life balance through easing the management and performance of tasks relating to the care of children and household work (Sullivan, 2012).

Presently, videoconference (VC) meetings have emerged as the predominant mediated communication method for remote business meetings (Karl et al., 2021; Standaert et al., 2021). Despite its widespread adoption, there are certain drawbacks warranting consideration. While VC may be adequate for short, routine business meetings aimed at information clarification, its efficacy diminishes in the context of longer meetings, particularly when robust interpersonal communication is critical for achieving meeting objectives (Standaert et al., 2022). This limitation is attributed to the VC meetings’ deficiency in facilitating an exchange of opinions and emotions, or building interpersonal relationships (Standaert et al., 2021; Standaert et al., 2022). More specifically, this can be attributed to interlocutors in VC meetings lacking a sense of social presence – the feeling of being physically present with and socially connected to others (Biocca et al., 2003).

Furthermore, VC technology insufficiently supports business meetings as it only offers limited support for nonverbal cues. As a result, these meetings provide fewer opportunities for informal and social interactions than traditional face-to-face business meetings (Standaert et al., 2022). One theory that has been posited related to this limited support for nonverbal communication focuses on the concept of “nonverbal overload.” In this theory, Bailenson (2021) contends that individuals must continuously interpret and enact nonverbal communicational cues; a challenge aggravated by VC providing fewer social cues (Sharan et al., 2022) than face-to-face (F2F) meetings, making it more difficult to discern subtle nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and gestures (Nesher Shoshan and Wehrt, 2021). Additionally, Fauville et al. (2023) indicated that nonverbal overload in VC meetings was exacerbated by individuals constantly observing themselves (i.e., “mirror anxiety” (Kuhn, 2022)), and hyper-gaze – the having to engage in reciprocal eye contact with multiple interlocutors simultaneously. As a result of this nonverbal overload, videoconferencing can hinder the ability to properly evaluate the reactions of others (Kuzminykh and Rintel, 2020a; Bailenson, 2021; Fauville et al., 2023). As VC meetings become more common and frequent, this may expose workers to a risk of diminished wellbeing (Standaert et al., 2022; Fauville et al., 2023; Queiroz et al., 2023). That is, the fatigue caused by videoconferencing – which has been popularly coined as “Zoom fatigue” (Bennett et al., 2021; Fosslien and Duffy, 2022) – can put individuals at risk of exhaustion or even burn-out in the long-term (Döring et al., 2022). The frustration arising from the aforenoted aspects of VC meetings may even trigger participants to purposedly lower their engagement in VC meetings (Kuzminykh and Rintel, 2020b).

Aside from its effect on participants’ engagement, it has been suggested that videoconferences have a detrimental effect on a meeting’s conversational flow (Bailenson, 2021; Skowronek et al., 2022). Whereas in F2F meetings the conversation naturally flows from one subject to another, this dynamic becomes more intricate in VC meetings. Interlocutors have to make more effort to receive and send nonverbal cues, making active participation a more challenging endeavour (Bailenson, 2021). Furthermore, VC meetings are limited in their ability to support smooth turn-taking, meaning that it is more difficult for meeting participants to predict who will speak next at the end of the previous speaker’s utterance (Skowronek et al., 2022). In F2F meetings, eye gaze plays a regulating role in this process, specifically by facilitating turn yielding (Degutyte and Astell, 2021). When gaze cues are not mutually shared, smooth turn-taking among interlocutors is inherently more challenging (Ishii et al., 2013). VCs typically have participants distributed in small and suboptimal positions on a screen, incommoding a consistent visual gaze with other participants (Horstmann and Linke, 2022). This obstacle in establishing and sustaining a visual gaze with other participants may encumber turn-taking during VC business meetings and subsequently impede a smooth conversational flow.

In instances where VC has limitations regarding the engagement and conversational flow of business meetings, eXtended Reality (XR) technologies (i.e., virtual, augmented or mixed reality) have the potential to be a viable solution (Campbell et al., 2019; Abdullah et al., 2021; Sadeghi et al., 2021; Döring et al., 2022; Standaert et al., 2022). Social XR, in particular, is an emerging social interaction paradigm mediated by XR technologies, where individuals experience social and spatial presence and engage in real-time interpersonal conversation and shared activities. Social XR is of particular importance to enable social interactions in the Metaverse (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2023), i.e., a network of virtual computer-mediated environments. Many social XR applications have been developed and deployed to better support remote interaction and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic (Osborne et al., 2023). Such applications and their immersive environments may allow users to interact in a similar manner to face-to-face communication, as it enhances users’ social presence (Campbell et al., 2019; Abramczuk et al., 2023) and spatial presence (Hartmann et al., 2015). This, in turn, can promote more togetherness – the sense of being together with others in a virtual environment (Durlach and Slater, 2000; Barreda-Ángeles and Hartmann, 2022).

Moreover, social XR can enhance users’ comprehension of the nonverbal cues exhibited by fellow participants, enabling users to discern others’ intentions and gauge to what extent they are engaged to the meeting (Abramczuk et al., 2023), which is – as indicated before – proven to be challenging in VC meetings (Bailenson, 2021). Given that a better detection of nonverbal cues leads to improved turn-taking (Degutyte and Astell, 2021), this may also positively affect the conversational flow. A recent study by Mills and Boscher (2023) indeed suggests that social XR allows conversation partners to flexibly take turns through visual gaze, which further cements social XR’s potential to overcome the disadvantages of VC for remote business meetings. Taken together, social XR not only enables a more natural and immersive experience (Skowronek et al., 2022), but also facilitates the convergence of individuals who are geographically separated within the same virtual environment. The sense of being in the same location allows them to communicate as if they were interacting in F2F (Perry, 2016; Standaert et al., 2022). In this exploratory study, we investigated whether social XR is able to sustain the advantages of meeting remotely, while concurrently mitigating the drawbacks associated with remote videoconferencing. For this purpose, we facilitated XR meetings in various organizations’ workplaces, allowing employees to review the XR system during an actual work meeting. The meetings were conducted in Meta Workrooms, a collaborative virtual office and conferencing platform that allows users to participate from diverse locations through the use of a head-mounted display (HMD). It provides a range of customizable office environments, adaptable to the specific requirements and preferences (e.g., giving a presentation, number of participants, etc.). Moreover, Workrooms employs embodied VR, which tracks participants movements and facial expressions and thus allows users to control the avatar’s nonverbal communication in the virtual environment. Embodied VR has demonstrated efficacy in engendering a sense of social presence (Smith and Neff, 2018), and thus can be beneficial for remote meetings. As this interpersonal connection is critical for a group to collectively develop innovative ideas in brainstorm meeting (Paulus and Kenworthy, 2019), this type of meeting was selected to explore if social XR can offer a viable alternative to VC in regard to remote business meetings. This decision was reinforced by Abramczuk et al. (2023)’s study, which suggested that social XR can present an optimal platform for remote business meetings that require strong engagement from all participants. We expected that in these XR brainstorming sessions, participants would be more engaged and experience a more natural conversational flow compared to VC meetings.

The current study explored whether social XR has the potential to become a superior option over VC meeting methods for workplace business meetings. The vast majority of the participants had no previous experience with Meta Horizon Workrooms – i.e. 98%. Moreover, 47% of the sample reported no prior experience with gaming, compared to 24% with considerable gaming experience. The various topic-related themes and subthemes identified from the qualitative interviews are displayed in Table 3.

The objective of this study was to explore the efficacy of social XR in contrast to VC meeting methods within the context of business meetings, with an emphasis on meeting engagement and conversational flow. Participants consistently expressed a preference for the interaction experienced in social XR over the conventional VC meetings. Furthermore, they were positive about the ease of taking and relinquishing a turn. These modalities were commonly attributed to the enhanced discernability of nonverbal communication in comparison to VC, such as hand gestures and body language. As a consequence, meetings in social XR were more closely aligned with F2F encounters. This finding is in line with previous research, which suggested that embodied XR can resemble F2F meetings not only in verbal, but also nonverbal communicative behavior (Smith and Neff, 2018; Maloney et al., 2020).

Participants expressed that they experienced less hindrance from dominant speakers in the XR meetings, in comparison to VC meetings. Previous research suggested that interlocutors utilize a more formal speaking style in VC meetings, whereas social XR meetings seem to emulate the less formal style of F2F meetings (Abdullah et al., 2021). This less formal style may contribute to participants being less hampered by dominant speakers. The incorporation of spatial audio further enhanced the meeting interaction by facilitating the identification of the speaker’s location. The capacity to discern from which direction an interlocutor is speaking in the social XR environment allows individuals to turn toward others and engage in eye gazing, which contributes people in their interpersonal interaction. This creates a conversational environment similar to F2F meetings (Campbell et al., 2019).

However, participants maintained a preference for F2F meetings over the interaction in social XR. This inclination toward F2F meetings can be attributed to two underlying factors. The first factor is related to the technology itself, as the current imperfections in XR contribute to this preference. Participants indicated that the avatars often fail to accurately convey facial expressions, impeding the interpretation of nonverbal cues by their interlocutors. Second, it is important to consider that for the majority of participants, this was their first meeting in a virtual environment. In previous research by Abramczuk et al. (2023), individuals were given the opportunity to use social XR for meetings over a duration of 7 weeks. Their findings suggested that their participants exhibited a gradual increase in receptivity of the XR system, suggesting the presence of a habituation phase. Interestingly, recent findings show that the intention to use XR technology is positively influenced by cognitive age (Charness and Boot, 2009; Yang and Shih, 2020). Here, individuals belonging to older age cohorts definitely held a less favorable disposition towards the utilization of avatars compared to their younger counterparts.

In line with previous research (Campbell et al., 2019), participants felt an improved sense of togetherness. However, the sense of proximity to other participants in the virtual environment originated more through the recognition of other participants’ voices than the visual representation of their avatars. This underscores the importance of avatar realism (Bailenson et al., 2006). Consonant with previous research (Phadnis et al., 2023), the avatars were perceived as fun, but lacking in professionalism and consequently deemed as unfit for use for external business meetings. Moreover, participants indicated that the lack of appropriate facial expressions can cause conversations to feel artificial, a sentiment previously emphasized in research of XR featuring avatars (Abramczuk et al., 2023).

A major limitation of this study is the notable divergence in resemblance between the avatars and the participants. Unfortunately conducting the study on-site during the participants’ workdays, imposed time constraints that prevented modifications of the avatars prior to each meeting. Considering the Proteus effect (Yee and Bailenson, 2007), which states that an individual’s behavior in the virtual environment is altered by the characteristics of their avatars, this divergence may have influenced the behavior participants exhibited during the meeting. In social immersive environments, realistic avatars are rated significantly more human-like when used as avatars for other participants and evoke a stronger acceptance in terms of virtual body ownership (Latoschik et al., 2017).

A second limitation is rooted in technology, namely, the reality head-mounted display (HMD) that users wear in order to enter the virtual world. Various participants argued that they experienced wearing the HMD to be cumbersome after a while. This would make it difficult for participants to engage in longer or multiple subsequent meetings in a day, which reduces the efficacy of the usage of XR for business meetings. Nonetheless, as XR technology develops, newer HMDs tend to weigh less and impose less stress on a user’s head. In line with previous research on XR meetings (Abramczuk et al., 2023), no issues related to cyber sickness were found. This is promising for the future use of XR as a platform for meeting purposes, as its acceptance is negatively affected by cyber sickness (Sagnier et al., 2020). One additional limitation arose from the Wi-Fi connectivity. In some sessions, technical difficulties relating to the Wi-Fi connectivity were encountered, resulting in restricted meeting capabilities during those meetings.

Given that the meeting groups in this study were limited to a maximum of four participants, the dynamics of taking and yielding conversational turns in multiparty XR meetings remain uncertain. As was discussed earlier, participants were very positive about the ease of turn-taking in these relatively small groups. However, multiparty VC meetings can comprise of groups with a significantly larger number of participants than four. In these meeting scenarios “false start” issues may appear, meaning that multiple listeners attempt to initiate a new turn, resulting in those speakers interrupting each other and necessitating multiple iterations to ascertain who can proceed the next turn (Skowronek et al., 2022). Considering that the gaze patterns are crucial for interaction and turn-taking appear to differ in varying group sizes (Maran et al., 2020), investigating how these manifest in XR could be an interesting avenue for future research endeavors.

In addition to the restricted group sizes, a limitation of this study was that it only contained a single session. Participants articulated the necessity to acclimate to the virtual environment. Hence the outcomes of this study may have differed if the participants had accrued a more extensive familiarity with the system. Consequently, exploring the responses of participants subsequent to prolonged usage could yield further valuable insights into the use of XR technology for meetings. Additionally, some participants indicated the importance of knowing the other participants beforehand – or indicated they felt togetherness due to the recognition of their interlocutors. Hence, the findings of this study may have been influenced by whether a participants knew the others or not.

Additionally, in this single testing session, participants received attention and support. Firstly, the meetings were relatively short, which was a deliberate choice as most participants were first time users, most participants were familiar with the other participants, and only used a single software application, which was readied for them by the researchers. This session was then compared to all previous experiences with VC and F2F meetings. In other words, this study compares a standardized version of XR meetings to unstandardized VC and F2F meetings. Consequently, participants contrasted one well-organized XR meeting to a wide array of non-XR meetings, potentially leading to an exaggeratedly more favorable experience for the XR meetings. Issues around factors such as connectivity issues were not taken into account, which could potentially lead to problems for XR meetings in places with less stable internet connection in comparison to the Netherlands. Besides this, almost none of the participants in this study had previous experience with XR meetings. Future studies could further investigate how various of these scenario’s that may occur during the “real-life” usage of XR applications could affect people’s perspective on XR meetings.

The use of avatars has limited many participants in their interaction with other interlocutors. This has, however, also had its advantages, particularly in their capacity to serve as facilitators of workplace equality. For example, the utility of avatars has the ability to support individuals experiencing discomfort with public speaking by offering a sense of concealment behind their virtual representation (Abramczuk et al., 2023). This positively contributes to the impact XR meetings can have on reducing the perception of being observed and the lowering of self-consciousness in comparison to VC meetings (Lenning et al., 2023). Given that lowering these negative effects decreases the nonverbal load (Bailenson, 2021; Fauville et al., 2023), the usage of avatars has the potential to increase the overall wellbeing (Fauville et al., 2023). However, previous research also suggested that individuals using an avatar of a person with a different skin color or cultural identity may reinforce negative stereotypes (Nakamura, 2002). Investigating how avatars affect workplace discrimination and equality may serve as an interesting trajectory for future studies.

Lastly, the importance of avatar realism implies the potential viability of photorealistic social XR for remote business meetings, in which individuals are scanned by a camera, and their representations are displayed in the virtual environment via the utilization of point cloud technology (Prins et al., 2018; Gunkel et al., 2021). The efficacy of certain platforms for business meetings could be a promising trajectory for future research.

In conclusion, this study has investigated whether social XR technology holds promise as a viable alternative to VC methods for conducting business meetings. The study has shown that the use of social XR comes with benefits for conducting remote business meetings and presents interesting possibilities for mitigating the challenges associated with remote VC. Participants of the study reported improved interaction, more togetherness, and a better conversational flow when using social XR. Embodied virtual reality was identified as useful in supporting nonverbal communication by allowing for more natural interaction and turn-taking, similar to face-to-face interactions. However, it must be taken into account that the current study was exploratory and compared one meeting in XR to a wide range of previous VC and F2F meetings. Furthermore, certain obstacles must be addressed before endorsing the widespread adoption of XR for remote business meetings. These obstacles pertain to avatar realism and the developing technological state of social XR, which renders current widespread adoption a difficult task. Subsequent research should address these issues.