Connecting Across Realities: Understanding and Designing for Cross-Reality Social Interactions Through the Lens of Social VR Live Streaming

Abstract

The increasing accessibility of immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has driven a growing trend toward cross-reality interactions, a new paradigm in which individuals across different realities (e.g., VR, AR and physical worlds) gather, communicate, and collaborate together. However, existing cross-reality research is largely confined to controlled laboratory settings, leaving the real-world cross-reality social interactions largely unexplored. My dissertation addresses this gap by studying social VR live streaming as a real-world, naturalistic lens for understanding and designing cross-reality social interactions through three studies. Study 1 examines how social VR streamers create and manage cross-reality social interactions with their 2D audiences in practice, especially how they have developed unique strategies, faced nuanced limitations, and proposed important design needs. Study 2 investigates how non-VR audiences, as everyday users of 2D display devices, also experience such interactions while remaining technologically disconnected from immersive VR space. Study 3 will then design and evaluate a prototype system that supports richer cross-reality social interactions in social VR streaming contexts. This work advances the design of future cross-reality systems that facilitate more inclusive, socially meaningful social interactions across different technological realities.