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When Action Speaks Louder than Words: Exploring Non-Verbal and Paraverbal Features in Dyadic Collaborative VR
Dennis Osei Tutu1,2, Sepideh Habibiabad1, Wim Van den Noortgate2
1imec-mict-UGent, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Miriam Makebaplein 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
|September 13, 2025
Summary
Virtual reality (VR) training can objectively assess soft skills by analyzing non-verbal and paraverbal behaviors during collaboration. Task design in VR influences communication patterns, enabling data-driven insights for skill development.
Area of Science:
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Cognitive Science
- Educational Technology
Background:
- Soft skills like communication and collaboration are crucial but challenging to train and assess objectively.
- Traditional methods, such as role-playing, suffer from subjective evaluations and time-intensive analysis.
- Virtual reality (VR) presents a scalable solution for immersive training and objective behavioral data capture.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how different task designs within a virtual reality environment influence non-verbal and paraverbal behaviors during dyadic collaboration.
- To compare behavioral differences between a VR task with shared visual access and dynamic gesturing versus one requiring verbal coordination through separation and turn-taking.
- To explore the potential of VR for data-driven assessment of collaboration skills.
Main Methods:
- Participants engaged in two distinct collaborative puzzle tasks within a VR environment.
- Multimodal tracking data, including gaze, hand gestures, facial expressions, and speech, were collected.
- Clustering analysis was employed to differentiate behavioral profiles across the two task designs.
Main Results:
- A more constrained VR task (Task 2) led to increased visual focus on individual workspaces, reducing partner-directed attention.
- Gesture frequency was higher in tasks with shared visual access (Task 1).
- Speech duration and structure increased under enforced turn-taking conditions (Task 2), and joint attention improved with verbal descriptions.
Conclusions:
- Virtual reality task design significantly shapes non-verbal and paraverbal communication behaviors during collaboration.
- VR offers a powerful tool for eliciting specific soft skill-related behaviors, enabling objective, data-driven assessment.
- Findings support the development of scalable VR-based assessment frameworks for training, adaptive agents, and human-AI collaboration.
Keywords:
VR interaction analysiscollaborationcommunicationmultimodal behavior trackingsoft skills trainingMore Related Videos
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