Research Article

Research and Analysis of Key Interaction Design Features of Virtual Space Co-Presence Based on XR Collaboration and Social VR Projects in Recent Five Years

Junlu ShenNorth China University of Technology*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

In the past five years, the formation of co-presence in virtual space has gradually presented a clear path of interaction design. Based on the review and case comparison of 14 pieces of literature on XR collaboration and social VR from 2021 to 2026, this paper summarizes the relevant designs into five high-frequency features: shared spatial reference and co-existing context, social representation and embodied clues, communication channels and social signals, joint attention and state visibility, and action coupling and cooperation mechanism. The study found that the related programs generally showed structural tension between shared control and individual autonomy, cue saliency and interference burden, realism and mismatch/strangeness. Finally, it is concluded that the improvement of co-presence does not depend on the simple superposition of the number of clues, but on selecting the "minimum effective feature set" around the task goal, and maintaining a stable common reference, clear other perception and coordinated pace of action in different social scales and use situations through adjustable, hierarchical and degradable interaction mechanisms.

Keywords: Co-presence; Social presence; Virtual space; XR collaboration; Interaction design
Published: May 11, 2026
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2026.33403
Volume: CHR Vol.107
pp. 155-162
Download PDF

References

  1. Bareišytė, L., Slatman, S., Austin, J., Rosema, M., van Sintemaartensdijk, I., Watson, S., & Bode, C. (2024). Questionnaires for evaluating virtual reality: A systematic scoping review. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 16, 100505.
  2. Lee, G., Lee, D. Y., Su, G. M., & Manocha, D. (2024). "may i speak?": Multi-modal attention guidance in social vr group conversations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 30(5), 2287-2297.
  3. Kimmel, S., Jung, F., Matviienko, A., Heuten, W., & Boll, S. (2023, April). Let's face it: Influence of facial expressions on social presence in collaborative virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).
  4. Fink, D. I., Zagermann, J., Reiterer, H., & Jetter, H. C. (2022). Re-locations: Augmenting personal and shared workspaces to support remote collaboration in incongruent spaces. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(ISS), 1-30.
  5. Grønbæk, J. E. S., Sánchez Esquivel, J., Leiva, G., Velloso, E., Gellersen, H., & Pfeuffer, K. (2024, May). Blended whiteboard: Physicality and reconfigurability in remote mixed reality collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).
  6. Huang, X., & Xiao, R. (2024). Surfshare: Lightweight spatially consistent physical surface and virtual replica sharing with head-mounted mixed-reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 7(4), 1-24.
  7. Gottsacker, M., Numan, N., Steed, A., Bruder, G., Welch, G. F., & Feiner, S. (2025, April). Decoupled hands: An approach for aligning perspectives in collaborative mixed reality. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7).
  8. Kullmann, P., Schell, T., Menzel, T., Botsch, M., & Latoschik, M. E. (2025). Coverage of facial expressions and its effects on avatar embodiment, self-identification, and uncanniness. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
  9. Kang, S., Song, H., Yoon, B., Kim, K., & Woo, W. (2023, October). Effects of different facial blendshape combinations on social presence for avatar-mediated mixed reality remote communication. In 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct) (pp. 439-440). IEEE.
  10. Yan, Y., Liu, H., Shi, Y., Wang, J., Guo, R., Li, Z., ... & Shi, Y. (2023). Conespeech: Exploring directional speech interaction for multi-person remote communication in virtual reality. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 29(5), 2647-2657.
  11. Zhang, Y., Wen, Y., Hu, S., & Lu, Z. (2025). SpeechCap: Leveraging Playful Impact Captions to Facilitate Interpersonal Communication in Social Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), 1-33.
  12. Darbar, R., Santuz, H., Taly, A., & Baaden, M. (2024, December). GazeMolVR: Sharing eye-gaze cues in a collaborative VR environment for molecular visualization. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (pp. 7-23).
  13. Wang, X., Shen, L., Chen, L., Fan, M., & Lee, L. H. (2025). Teamportal: Exploring virtual reality collaboration through shared and manipulating parallel views. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
  14. Johnson, J. G., Sharkey, T., Butarbutar, I. C., Xiong, D., Huang, R., Sy, L., & Weibel, N. (2023, April). Unmapped: Leveraging experts' situated experiences to ease remote guidance in collaborative mixed reality. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-20).
  15. Kim, H., & Park, J. M. (2024). Providing dual awareness using multimodal cues for collaborative manipulation in virtual environments. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40(12), 3298-3312.