Body Crumple, Sound Intrusion, and Embodiment Violation: Toward a Framework for Miscommunication in VR

The advent of widely-accessible VR has enabled individuals to communicate—and miscommunicate—in new ways. To explore these miscommunications, we introduce a preliminary framework based on events that occurred during 3600 minutes of observation inside a university course taught in VR. During the course, 250 people met in groups for about 20 minutes per session. We identify three types of miscommunication that routinely occurred: body crumple, sound intrusion, and embodiment violation. By mapping the affordances by which social VR fails to facilitate effective communication, we hope to provide educators, developers, and virtual ethnographers with a means for understanding and navigating the challenges of VR-based collaboration.