Verisimilitude as Boon and Bane: How People Initiate Opportunistic Interactions at Professional Events in Social VR

Abstract

Opportunistic interactions-the unstructured exchanges that emerge as individuals become aware of each other's presence-are essential for relationship building and information sharing in everyday life. Yet, fostering effective opportunistic interactions has proven challenging, especially at professional events that have increasingly transitioned from in person to online formats. In the current paper, we offer an in-depth qualitative account of how people initiate opportunistic interactions in social VR. Our participants consisted of 16 individuals with ongoing experience attending VR-mediated events in their professional communities. We conducted extensive observations with each participant during one or more events they attended. We also interviewed them after every observed event, obtaining self-reflections on their attempts to navigate opportunistic interactions with others. Our analysis revealed that participants sought to understand the extent to which social VR preserved the real-world meanings of various nonverbal cues, which we refer to as verisimilitude. We detailed the unique connections between a person's perceived verisimilitude and their social behaviors at each of the three steps toward initiating opportunistic interactions: availability recognition, attention capture, and ice-breaking. Across these steps, the VR platform typically replaces complex social mechanisms with feasible technical ones in order to function, thereby altering the preconditions necessary for a nonverbal cue's social meanings to remain intact. We identified a rich set of strategies that participants developed to assess verisimilitude and act upon it, while also confirming a lack of systematic knowledge guiding their practices. Based on these findings, we provide actionable insights for social VR platform design that can best support the initiation of opportunistic interactions for professional purposes.