Video corpus of interaction in the social virtual reality space Rec Room

This corpus was collected in 2021 at the LeaF research infrastructure, University of Oulu. The data was collected as a part of the research project Remote Research and Collaboration Using VR and 360° Video.
Three pairs were invited to interact in a quasi-experimental setting in the social virtual reality (VR) platform Rec Room (https://recroom.com). Rec Room provides its users with various opportunities for socialization, including exploration of its various spaces, and games such as 3D Charades, Disc Golf and Paintball. Each pair knew each other prior to the recording session.
The participants were instructed to explore the space together freely. The participants used Meta Quest 2 head-mounted displays (HMD) and hand-held controllers to interact in VR. They were situated in two adjacent rooms so they could hear and see each other only in the virtual space. The participants were recorded from multiple perspectives: their first-person perspective to the VR environment was recorded using screen capture software, and their physical environment was recorded using video cameras.
The corpus includes a total of 3 hours of video recordings and detailed transcripts of participants’ conduct, both audible and multimodal, that was captured in the recordings. The main method is multimodal conversation analysis. The language used in the data is Finnish.
The ethical guidelines and criteria of the Finnish National Board for Research Integrity were followed during the data collection. The participants were provided with written information about the study and data protection, and they signed their informed consent for being video recorded for research purposes.