Project funding
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Funding directive "Closeness over distance - enabling interpersonal connectedness with interactive technologies".
Project duration
2023-2026
Consortium
Professorships
Prof. Dr. Nicola Döring (Head of Media Psychology and Media Design, TU Ilmenau)
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Jan Ehlers (Head of Usability, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich (Head of Virtual Reality and Visualisation, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Prof. Dr. Eva Hornecker (Head of Human-Computer Interaction, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar; project coordination)
Industry partners
Project description GROOVE
Joint activities such as dancing, singing or movement games are based on the synchronisation of interpersonal interaction and are particularly suitable for evoking feelings of belonging and strengthening social bonds.
GROOVE aims to enable social virtual entrainment, i.e. experienced behavioural synchronisation, despite unavoidable transmission latency, through clever interaction design in social virtual reality.
The aim is to specifically address the cognitive psychological factors that underlie the synchronisation of human behaviour. In addition, techniques will be designed to support behavioural adaptation, including rhythm generators from the virtually synchronised environment or the creation of similarly directed movement illusions. From the technical side, virtual entrainment is to be supported in the best possible way by a clock-synchronised environment with constant low latency as well as via the algorithmic prediction and completion of periodic movement activity. Dancing, making music and playing together is thus possible even over long distances - albeit under slightly different rules. In this way, interactive content creates incentives for activity and shared experiences that clearly go beyond the possibilities of telephone calls and video conferences.
With the help of longitudinal studies lasting several months, we want to document the emergence and development of social-virtual entrainment for our target groups (families, couples, close circles of friends). Empirical analyses of the psychological, physiological and behavioural conditioning factors will allow us to operationalise the quality of virtual (co-)presence and to assess under which conditions entrainment-optimised social virtuality is able to promote feelings of closeness and connectedness.
Press release on the project launch
Link to the project website at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Sub-project at the TU Ilmenau
The professorship of Media Psychology and Media Design is primarily involved in the overall project with the sub-project Empirical-Quantitative Studies and Summative Evaluation.
The tasks in this sub-project include
theoretical conceptualisation of entrainment in the VR context and in connection with social closeness,
operationalisation of the corresponding constructs by means of reliable and valid measurement instruments, and
planning and implementation of empirical-quantitative studies such as vignette experiments, laboratory experiments and field experiments.
The quantitative data collected in this way contributes primarily to the summative evaluation of the technologies developed in GROOVE project.
