Virtual Negotiations: Designing and Analysing Group Collaboration Outcomes in the Metaverse

The Metaverse, an immersive 3D virtual world poised to succeed the mobile internet with substantial investments from global tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, is increasingly influencing various life aspects, including brain-to-brain attunement and empathy, despite lacking a universally accepted definition. Our ongoing experiments are exploring individual and group dynamics within the Metaverse using Virtual Reality (VR), already highlighting how it can attenuate human biases and alter interaction outcomes. This project is actively conducting a series of experiments to understand individual and group outcomes, with preliminary findings beginning to reveal factors affecting learning in virtual worlds compared to real and online environments. Crucially, our observations indicate that the gender of a virtual avatar significantly impacts individual outcomes, such as the perceived ease of the hiring process. Furthermore, we are evaluating how feedback quality varies based on gender interactions within the Metaverse. These studies are uncovering the underlying mechanisms behind immersive interactions, and our preliminary results are informing the design of productive and safe virtual environments.