Publications

Since U Been Gone: Augmenting Context-Aware Transcriptions for Re-Engaging in Immersive VR Meetings

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2025

Publication date: April 28, 2025

Geonsun Lee, Yue Yang, Jennifer Healey, Dinesh Manocha

Maintaining engagement in immersive meetings is challenging, particularly when users must catch up on missed content after disruptions. While transcription interfaces can help, table-fixed panels have the potential to distract users from the group, diminishing social presence, while avatar-fixed captions fail to provide past context. We present EngageSync, a context-aware avatar-fixed transcription interface that adapts based on user engagement, offering live transcriptions and LLM-generated summaries to enhance catching up while preserving social presence. We implemented a live VR meeting setup for a 12-participant formative study and elicited design considerations. In two user studies with small (3 avatars) and mid-sized (7 avatars) groups, EngageSync significantly improved social presence (𝑝 < .05) and time spent gazing at others in the group instead of the interface over table-fixed panels. Also, it reduced re-engagement time and increased information recall (𝑝 < .05) over avatar-fixed interfaces, with stronger effects in mid-sized groups (𝑝 < .01).

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