Toward VR in VR: Assessing Engagement and Social Interaction in a Virtual Conference

The pandemic brought about an unprecedented number of virtual conferences, given the heavy restrictions on travel to in-person meetings. Despite all the advances in technology, people still complain about virtual events. There is Zoom fatigue, confinement malaise, and a longing for personal social interactions. This paper discusses our experience organizing the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (IEEE VR) as a virtual event. IEEE VR was a success with 1200+ registered paying participants, dozens of workshops and tutorials, and hundreds of technical papers. We used (1) a virtual environment platform, together with (2) discussion tools and (3) videoconferencing/broadcast/online tools to further provide effective social interaction and increase engagement. In this paper, we explore the synergies between virtual environments and other online tools and assess user engagement by analyzing the messages exchanged between participants across different genders and geographical regions. To this end, we apply diverse engagement metrics for online conferences. Our analysis shows that these metrics have the potential to highlight engagement, diversity, and inclusion by combining textual messages, participant geographic and gender information, communities of participants, and visitation patterns in a virtual environment. Drawing on our results and experiences, we propose guidelines for organizing technical virtual events to increase diversity and social interaction.