Nowadays, social interaction is often mediated by technology, which makes it possible for people to interact with each other when they are separated. However, most of these technologies target the interaction between 'weak ties' and they cannot support the naturalness and richness offered through face-to-face interaction. Recently, a new type of mediated social interaction technology, social VR, is opening new possibilities. Social VR technology allows users who are separated to interact with virtual representations of other people in shared virtual environments. These types of social VR technologies are believed to have the potential to create social interactions that are similar to face-to-face interaction. Efforts are needed to understand how people experience interacting with others in social VR. What are the advantages of social VR that make it different from other social medias, and how can these be used to improve mediated social interaction. Regarding this knowledge gap, the problem defined in this project is to understand the impact of social VR on user experience during social interaction. This project is divided into six parts: exploring a UX framework for social VR, understanding the photo sharing context, designing an evaluation methodology, evaluating user experience in an experiment, providing design recommendations and reflecting on the project. In PART 1, the user experience framework of social VR is explored. Several relevant frameworks are selected and compared. These frameworks help us to create a common ground understanding of user experience in social VR. In PART 2, user experience is explored in a specific scenario - photo sharing between two friends. Context mapping is used to understand the important dimensions of user experience. Three dimensions of experience are identified: Quality of interaction, Social meaning and Presence/immersion. In PART3, an evaluation methodology is developed according to the research findings in PART 2. This methodology consists of a quantitative part and a qualitative part. For the quantitative part, a questionnaire is developed, based on a set of questions selected from related work. For the qualitative part, a semi-structured interview is designed. In PART 4, the evaluation methodology from PART 3 is used in a user experience experiment. We compare the experience of photo sharing in Social VR with a Face-to-face situation and a Skype situation. The experiment results show that social VR provide good experience of social meaning as well as presence and immersion. But the quality of interaction needs to be improved. In PART 5, design recommendations for social VR are proposed, based on the evaluation results from the experiment in PART 4. In PART 6, reflections on the whole project are provided. Suggestions for future research are given.

Nowadays, co-design is progressively popular in the area of customized retail services. Co-design involves users and potential customers into the whole process of product design, from ideation to final design, and thus, has a great potential in offering a personalized customer experience based on the individual needs and behaviors. However, usually co-design requires face-to-face communication, which might be difficult especially in the current corona time. Additionally, it is a challenge for the customer, the non-expert designer to equally collaborate with professional designers. Therefore, a tool is needed to support remote co-design actions and expower the non-expert users for an equal cooperation with designers. We propose that socialVR, an emerging mediated social interaction technology in the medium of Virtual Reality, has a potential in supporting remote and interactive co-design activities. Social VR technology enables users in different locations to interact with virtual avatars of other users in a collaborative Virtual Environment. Additionally, socialVR allows users to communicate with each other through diverse communication cues (i.e., 3d visual, audio, haptic), and hence, supports intricate social and physical interactions in co-design. In this project, we aim to explore how socialVR can facilitate co-design, and understand how socialVR influences people’s experience and behavior in remote collaborative design tasks To find out the answers, we follow a research-through-design methodology. Firstly, we choose a specific use case of collaborative cake-making between cake-makers and clients for the purpose of customized retail. Then, based on the current interaction between baker and clients, we designed and developed a medium-fidelity VR prototype, which allows two users collaboratively design cakes in VE wearing head-mounted displays (HMDs). After that, we performed a VR test for user evaluation, so as to investigate the impacts of socialVR on social and collaborative behavior, as well as validate the functionality and interaction techniques of this prototype. The results offer abundant insights for us to understand the how design non-experts experience interacting with professional designers and design systems in socialVR, and how their experience influences their behavior.