Conferencing together in social virtual reality: Bringing agency back into affordances-based approaches in communication scholarship

Abstract

Technological advancements allow embodied and synchronous communication via social virtual reality (VR), where multiple users interact as avatars in a shared virtual space. However, the affordances of social VR and how users interact with them have been underexplored. We expand the discourse on media affordances by emphasizing user agency in strategic media choices for overcoming constraints in physical and virtual worlds. We qualitatively investigated user experiences of a social VR platform. Findings from semi-structured interviews (N = 28) revealed that media selection is determined through a dynamic relationship between platforms designed to encourage action possibilities and users strategically leveraging media affordances to overcome situational constraints of their physical environment.

Keywords:

• Avatar
• conferences
• media affordances
• metaverse
• social VR
• virtual reality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Examples of environmental affordances would be a handle, which affords grasping, and a chair, which affords sitting.

Additional information

Funding

This material was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 2032474. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.