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Bank of Ireland Tests Meetings in Virtual Reality (Draft)
Abraham G Campbell1, Athanasios Staikopoulos 2, Jess Connor1, Thomas Holz
, Mike Harlick and Jonny Cosgrove1
1MeetingRoom, Dublin, Ireland
{abey@meetingroom.io
2 Learnovate Centre, TCD, Ireland
Abstract. This paper summarises a case study conducted by Meetingroom
and Bank of Ireland in exploring the use of Virtual Reality to conduct
meetings online. The case study was to compare Virtual Reality meetings to
traditional video teleconferencing software. The results point to the improved
feelings of presence, closeness, and arousal for Virtual Reality environments,
but also demonstrate a difference in the experience for female and male
participants. In particular, the use of Avatar's instead of real-life video images
of the participants was preferred by female participants which point to a
possible de-biasing ability for Virtual Reality environments.
Keywords: VR Collaboration, Video Conferencing
1 Company Description
MeetingRoom Software Limited operates meetingRoom.io, a plat-
form that enables team communications in one place. The platform
provides a range of capabilities, including real-time and contextual
group chats using spatial voice calls, file storage and sharing. In the
future it will incorporate integration with various enterprise apps,
and direct messaging and searching. Meetingroom provides Virtual
Meeting Rooms in the cloud. Traditionally these Virtual Reality
cloud platforms are used for gaming rather than enterprise environ-
ments but ironically the requirements for gaming networks in terms
of security and reliability have now acceded that of many existing
enterprise platforms. The advantage of using a cloud-based approach
to network, primarily is that of scalability and allows the support of
1,000's of users with ease.
2 Project summary
2
Today’s workforce environments are steadily becoming more dis-
tributed across the globe, raising the need for improved ways of fa-
cilitating collaborations at a distance (Oprean, Simpson, & Klippel,
2018).
Virtual worlds are expected to make an evolutionary leap to the
workplace and reshape business collaboration and communication
even more profoundly than video-conferencing did 10 years ago.
Virtual reality applications enable employees to get as much mobil-
ity and flexibility as they desire, and autonomy to work and access a
real visual representation of their working environment. Virtual
meeting rooms can be used to simulate real-life situations and show
how people behave, gesture and move around during conversations.
These technologies are powerful tools in the meetings and events
space, because they allow the creators to invent a world or recreate
an existing space that gives the users a fully immersive experience.
In addition, collaborative virtual environments provide users a shar-
ing space supporting different types of collaboration and interaction
scenarios.
However, despite the recent VR technology advances, there has been
limited research on the usability and effectiveness of Collaborative
Virtual Environments (CVEs) (Schroeder, Heldal, & Tromp, 2006 ).
Furthermore, there are even less CVEs which have been applied and
evaluated in the context of working and meeting spaces. One of the
main reasons was the immaturity of the technology causing many
usability problems. Another reason was that CVE were not available
for users to regular use (Schroeder, Heldal, & Tromp, 2006). In ad-
dition, most of the CVEs were developed as prototypes and proof of
concept for research purposes. In general, the usability and effective-
ness of CVEs is related to the degree in which participants can re-
motely meet, communicate, collaborate, interact and complete their
assigned tasks effectively and from within a virtual working envi-
ronment like in real life.
The purpose of this experiment was to evaluate the efficiency of rep-
resentative virtual reality collaborative tool compared to a video
conference. The case study is summarised in this paper but if the
reader is interested in greater detail on any aspect please consult
3
"Uses of Virtual Reality for Communication in Financial Ser-
vices: A Case Study on Comparing Different Telepresence Inter-
faces: Virtual Reality Compared to Video Conferencing"
(Campbell et al 2019)
Figure 1 VR setup
3 Project details
The research was conducted using meetingRoom.io meeting soft-
ware and Skype for Business an A/B test in Bank of Ireland, Grand
Canal Dock. Facilitated by University College Dublin with 100 par-
ticipants The project setup for one of the VR stations is shown in
Figure 1.
Two participants will be meeting using either VR or Skype, then
they will be surveyed on their experience. Following that experi-
ence, the users will then try to meet again using the alternative
method and be surveyed again. The participants will be using a me-
dia experience survey along with a questionnaire asking them which
4
they preferred.
The research hypothesis is that the VR experience will make the us-
ers feel more in control, be more present with the other user, and
more enjoyable than the video link up.
In summary the case study considered several hypothesises:
That Virtual Reality will be a more positive experience.
The participants will feel more in control of the application
in Virtual reality
Participants will feel more Immersed in the VR meeting
Participants will feel more close to each other in a VR meet-
ing
Participants will find the Virtual Reality meeting more excit-
ing than the Video Conference
The research was conducted using Virtual Reality meeting software
and Skype for Business as test environments to compare a Virtual
Reality meeting versus a Video conferencing environment.
4 Feedback from end users
The feedback from end users is outline in Figure 2 The participants
used a media experience survey along with a questionnaire asking
them which they preferred. Users felt more in control, are more pre-
sent with the other user, and found more enjoyable than the video
link up. The results point to the improved feelings in using Virtual
Reality environments.
Presence
Closeness
Arousal
It demonstrated clearly the difference in the experience for female
and male participants. In particular, the use of Avatar’s instead of
real-life video images of the participants was preferred by female
participants which point to a possible de-biasing ability for Virtual
Reality environments.
5
The results also indicate a need to explore difference interfaces de-
signs and discuss lessons from the historical adoption of technology
from the financial services community.
One very telling post interview exchange demonstrated this clearly
to the researcher. For context, all post interviews were done sepa-
rately, so the participants did not know what other had said as their
participation was anonymous. A female participant reported that she
felt that the other Avatar was not able to intimidate her as would
have been possible in a video call. A separate male participant re-
ported that he disliked the Virtual Reality world as he felt was
not able to intimidate the other participant which he was able to do
using a video conference.
During our post interviews with each of the participants, many men-
tioned the fact that on calls with more than 2 people that the conver-
sions would naturally become more difficult as each participants
needed to wait for other to stop talking. This waiting for a moment
of silence was required to enter into the conversation and the timing
of when to to talk got even more complex as more people entered
the call. In a Virtual world just like in real life, sound comes from
the direction of the participant talking thus this waiting was not re-
quired. This is not to suggest that people talk over each other but
that a participant could discern which speaker was talking along
with making out what was said as the audio came from a different
spatial direction. Along with more natural body language cues such
as simply raising your hand, this above all else points to a new use
of Virtual Reality to conduct teleconference calls in the future. The
value provided to the decision-making process with knowledge man-
agement in an organisation is exponential linked with the real world
conversation highlighted above.
6
Figure 2 Results showing the feedback from users in each condition
5 Future outlook/roadmap
Overall the participants meetings in both VR and using VC demon-
strated that teleconference technologies have matured to a point that
communication remotely when given dedicated connection, are
completely achievable.
Many participants in post interviews stated how video teleconfer-
ence normally suffer problems with connectivity, this is normally
due not to the creators of VC software but to the underlying infra-
structure. This is an ongoing problem where users do not have the
dedicated upload and download speeds required to conduct a call of
decent quality. VR can alleviate some of these issues due to the
lower bandwidth requirements of simply sending transforms for the
VR avatar location and limbs. This reduction is on average 1/10 the
requirements of sending Video. This, alongside the potential for de-
biasing and levelling effect of VR, coupled with the ratings from
older demographics, indicates to huge potential in terms of diversity
in the HR process and adoption in the financial services industry.
Further case studies are planned with existing customers of Meeting-
room to identify in detail where Virtual reality collaboration meet-
ings return value to a customer.
7
6 Conclusion
This experiment indicates the potential of VR for allowing custom-
ers and bank employees to meet remotely. These meeting will have
better engagement and focus if the results of this experiment can be
replicated in the VR meeting software used.
The hypothesis that participants would have more positive feelings
to VR when compared to video communications (VC) meeting was
only partially upheld and only in the case for female participants.
References
Campbell, A. G., Holz, T., Cosgrove, J., Harlick, M., & O’Sullivan, T. (2019, March). Uses
of Virtual Reality for Communication in Financial Services: A Case Study on
Comparing Different Telepresence Interfaces: Virtual Reality Compared to Video
Conferencing. In Future of Information and Communication Conference (pp. 463-481).
Springer, Cham.
Oprean d., Simpson M & Klippel A. (2018) Collaborating remotely: an evaluation of
immersive capabilities on spatial experiences and team membership, International
Journal of Digital Earth, 11:4, 420-436,
Schroeder, R., Heldal, I., & Tromp, J. (2006). The usability of collaborative virtual
environments and methods for the analysis of interaction. Presence: Teleoperators and
Virtual Environments, 15(6), 655–667.
