Physiological Transparency in VR

What happens when your VR collaborator can see your stress levels? This study at IEEE VR 2024 explored the effects of sharing physiological cues during assembly tasks.

The Question

Remote collaboration misses the subtle cues we get from physical presence—someone’s breathing, posture, fidgeting. Could physiological data sharing compensate?

What We Tested

Participants completed VR assembly tasks while their partner could (or couldn’t) see visualizations of their:

• Heart rate
• Stress levels
• Attention focus

Findings

The results were nuanced:

• Sharing increased awareness of partner’s state
• But also increased some participants’ self-consciousness
• Task performance depended on task type and relationship

The Privacy Question

This research surfaces important questions about physiological privacy. Just because we can share biosignals doesn’t mean we should. User agency and context matter enormously.

My Takeaway

This project taught me that adding information isn’t always better. The art of designing human-AI systems is knowing what to show, when, and how—and crucially, letting users control that.

Read the full paper: IEEE