VIRTUAL REALITY FOR REMOTE WORK: EXPLORING THE ACCEPTANCE OF VR TECHNOLOGY FOR MEETINGS AND BUSINESS-RELATED CONTEXTS
Patrícia Carrion · 2021
Virtual Reality is the term used to describe a computer-generated environment that people can, under the sense of immersion and presence, explore and interact with.This thesis aims to investigate how the presence of people in collaborative scenarios, such as work meetings, can be mediated in a beneficial way by the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies.In this sense, we believe that VR, if used as a tool to assist fully remote and hybrid work meetings, provide greater involvement and engagement of people during the activity.Our research was partially developed concurrently with the COVID-19 pandemic.Therefore, we argue about the relevance of investigating forms of interaction amid rules of social distancing.For a theoretical basis, we first formalized the concepts of reality and virtuality and covered the evolution of VR technologies and applications.Here, we demonstrated how three-dimensional immersion environments can impact the human experience and have been adopted by several industries beyond the universe of games.After the literature review, we defined research techniques to address several research questions.We started with an exploratory work on movement and interaction in VR, followed by semi-structured interviews and a web-based survey.The latter two focused on investigating people's perceptions of the physical and remote settings of work meetings.At last, the final experiment sought to apply a modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to measure the acceptance or rejection of VR as a tool for hybrid work meetings.