Exploring the Meeting Experiences in the Metaverse: A User Study on Immersive Interactions

Meetings in non-immersive platforms, such as MS Teams, present issues of usability, effectiveness, and social communication nature. As a consequence, employees complain that their online meeting experience is substandard. However, TNO proposes its own immersive communication systems as a substitute. Its immersive environment can compensate for the insufficient experience that non-immersive platforms provide. We conducted an experiment to test whether these claims, also supported by the literature at hand, apply as well to the system developed by TNO. The results show that the Pointcloud technology has potential, but the technological limitations prevent the system from being a valid alternative to MS Teams in the near future. We then highlighted the main issues in the technology that need to be addressed, to provide a meeting experience similar to or even better than the one on non-immersive platforms.