Wilko Heuten

Wilko Heuten

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Wilko Heuten

OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

14Years (2013-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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26 November 2019
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
PDF file
UGUwe Gruenefeld
Uwe Gruenefeld
LPLars Prädel
Lars Prädel
WHWilko Heuten
Wilko Heuten

7 November 2024 in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
SKSimon Kimmel
Simon Kimmel
ELEric Landwehr
Eric Landwehr
WHWilko Heuten
Wilko Heuten
Professional and personal lives are undergoing a shift from physical to virtual meetings. While this offers numerous advantages, such as increased spatial autonomy, it also poses risks to the social bonds among employees, families, and friends. Even current collaborative virtual reality (VR) applications cannot bridge the separation in virtual meetings, as they do not provide a sense of social connectedness comparable to in-person interaction. Reasons include limited behavioral realism of VR avatars, e.g., in displayed body movements. We systematically investigated how realistic body movements influence Social Presence in a collaborative VR task. We explored three types of motion-tracking mechanisms: no motion-tracking beyond controllers, hand-tracking, and full-body motion-tracking with hand-tracking. To examine their influence on Social Presence, we designed a spatial collaboration task based on insights gained from semi-structured interviews ( N = 6). Subsequently, we conducted a controlled VR experiment ( N = 18), in which participants' counterparts employed the various motion-tracking technologies while performing said task. Our results demonstrate that realistic body movements do not influence self-reported Social Presence in VR. Nevertheless, they entail an increased interpersonal distance among users, attributable to a subconscious influence on Social Presence.