The term "weird social" may evoke painful memories of awkward company events and work meet-ups. It's all fun and games until you hit the hard stuff: the veil of professionalism is gradually drawn back and it all starts to get a little… weird. 

Thankfully, you can bottle those memories up and toss them in the backrooms of your mind palace. We're not here to talk social faux pas or ungainly gatherings. We're here to talk about a burgeoning idea within XR collaboration that deserves your attention.

Weird social is a concept discussed and developed in the 2021 paper, The Case for "Weird Social" in VR/XR: A Vision of Social Superpowers Beyond Meatspace, co-authored by Joshua McVeigh-Shultz and Katherine Isbister. 

The authors introduce the term "weird social" to conceptualise novel and divergent social interactions encountered among virtual communities. They observed how many VR users were exploiting the technology to create rituals, customs and practices that were unique to their virtual spaces and often unthinkable in "meatspace" (as opposed to cyberspace). 

In contrast, typical enterprise applications of XR stay within the wheelhouse of familiarity, choosing to transpose their physical environment into a virtual mode. For example, the frequent inclusion of whiteboards and boardrooms in virtual meeting spaces, they argue, overlooks and underutilises the weird and the wonderful aspects of XR collaboration.

"What new strangeness may be within reach? And how can we think critically and make more thoughtful design decisions now, in ways that help us to anticipate and respond thoughtfully to new 'fantastically weird' collective capacities in VR and XR that could be activated in the near future?"

These provocations may appear a little vague at first – and there's a good reason. Sea changes are not easily predicted. What appears as a blind spot one day appears as cultural orthodoxy the next. There's no way of truly knowing how XR will be used in the remote future, except to say that what defines XR today will come to shape and define how it is used tomorrow. 

Social superpowers 

So what are the "fantastically weird" visions of the future and how are we to conceive of them in the here and now?

The authors describe these digital endowments as "social superpowers'': forms of non-verbal communication developed to enrich social life and support social awareness for XR users. Specifically, these capacities are born from the simple, unavoidable fact that cyberspace is not an "embodied" experience – and that our bodies play a key role in signalling and receiving a whole host of non-verbal cues. 

Our audio-visual senses are the primary ways in which we interface with extended reality systems. The lack of embodied presence means our proprioceptive senses and, for example, our haptic perception, play relatively minor roles (although developments in multi-sensory XR are advancing each day). As a consequence, some of the non-verbal communication we take for granted in meatspace is obscured or even lost. 

Shultz and Isbister suggest this isn't such a bad thing after all – in fact, they're positive it's the key to unlocking XR's potential.

"Weird social superpowers", to combine the terms, start as irregular modes of behaviour or solutions to the embodiment puzzle of cyberspace. Take the everyday example of emojis. 

Initially, emojis were developed as a way to signal an emotional or physical state in instant messaging services – a way to assist or augment text-based correspondence. 

However, emojis became something more than that: they became a mode of communication peculiar to instant messaging per se. We need only ask, when was the last time you used a real aubergine to express your feelings?

Rituals and data visualisation

In VR – and XR more generally – these types of interaction take on more complicated and thought-provoking forms.

For instance, certain communities overcome the absence of touch and physical affection through rituals like feeding – a non-verbal approach to signalling feelings like appreciation or affection by offering virtual food to a user's avatar. Other examples include "mirror hugging", in which users' avatars hug in front of a mirror – observing the act in the absence of feeling it.

For data visualisation, the lack of real bodies comes in handy. By leveraging virtual parameters, users can visualise embodied social dynamics like eye contact, attentiveness and even when someone is talking too much.

Participants of a Q&A in Rec Room were struggling to know who was talking and when. The creators of Rec Room came up with an ingenious solution: they positioned a large NPC cat in the room that would stare at whoever was talking on the microphone at any one moment – introducing different social geometries and modes of attention and awareness.  

In the authors' own research, efforts were made to prototype a "speech visualisation mechanic" to address "conversational imbalances" in group conferences. Coloured bubbles are emitted from the mouth of the speaker's avatar that represent each participant's input, amassing as blocks of colour in the environment. In another study, a green laser was used to represent the gaze of participants. When the laser made contact with objects in the virtual world, the objects would gradually turn red, thereby visualising where people's attention was being focused.

A similar capacity can be achieved with the use of emojis in virtual group meetings or in teleconferences. Emojis can be a great way of signalling live feelings and monitoring the state of a room. Imagine board meetings with emojis floating around the room like confetti at a wedding. 

To conclude

Potential applications of "weird social" capabilities are broad and present exciting possibilities within video collaboration. With SimplyVideo, video calls can become dynamic and productive social spaces that may yield unique and unexpected results.

Embracing the weirder side of XR benefits enterprises by encouraging new forms of engagement across all business platforms – and creating a dynamic workflow that utilises the strengths of both cyberspace and meatspace.

Interested in high-performance video collaboration software for "weird socials"? SimplyVideo works whenever you need it. Find out more about our XR video software – or sign up for a 30-day free trial.