Remote communication allows people who are not physically present in the same location to communicate in real-time, which has many positive societal impacts, such as reducing environmental pollution, travel cost and fatigue, supporting rich collaboration by connecting talented people around the world, brings families closer and improves the availability of high-quality education and healthcare around the world.  

Social Virtual Reality (VR) invites multiple users to join a collaborative virtual environment, which creates new opportunities for remote communication. The shared experiences obtained in social VR may reshape our subjective perception towards the physical world, leading to shifts in our understanding about social experience, selfhood, or realness, and bringing about novel everyday social interactions. However, social VR also raises privacy concerns and ethical risks when the boundary between the real and the virtual world is blurred. This workshop is intended to spur discussions on social VR as an emerging immersive remote communication tool.

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We invite academics and practitioners from all fields, e.g., computer science, psychology, HCI/UX, sociology, and designers, developers, governmental policymakers to help drive a research agenda for technologies, evaluation protocols, interaction techniques, application areas and research ethics for social VR. In this CHI2020 workshop, we will focus on interactive group work. Participants will be guided to collaboratively discuss the future of social VR using generative tools (e.g., images, clay, texts, 3D models).

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This workshop invites submission of position papers: 2-4 pages in SIGCHI Extend Abstract format (reference excluded), covering but not limited to the following topics:

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• Social VR Technologies. What is the current status of technology (e.g. capturing, reconstruction, rendering)? What are the technological requirements for improving social VR experiences in terms of quality of interaction, privacy protection etc.?

• Evaluation Protocols for Social VR Experiences. How to adequately evaluate different aspects of communication in social VR both subjectively (e.g., self-reports) and objectively (e.g., physiological sensors)? How to develop Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics for social VR?

• Interaction Techniques for Social VR. Should the interaction techniques replicate the real-world ones through the aid of multi-sensory simulation? Or should the interaction techniques extend beyond the reality?

• Applications for social VR. What can be the use cases of social VR? What are the requirements for building such social VR applications?

• Research Ethics of Social VR. What are the ethical considerations conducting research on social VR or using it as a research tool? What are the risks that are foreseeable with the widespread use of social VR (e.g., long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, content, and privacy)?

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Submitted position papers will be reviewed and selected by the workshop organizers. At least one author of the accepted paper must attend the workshop. All participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.