VIRTUES: A Virtual Reality Multimodal Sensing Platform for Quantifying and Supporting Cross-Neurotype Collaboration

Effective workplace collaboration is essential for productivity and creativity, yet achieving the necessary mutual understanding can be challenging, particularly involving individuals from different neurotypes. This work evaluates VIRTUES, a Virtual Reality (VR) platform designed to foster mutual understanding and collaborative behaviors between autistic and neurotypical individuals. VIRTUES integrates multimodal sensing (eye tracking, interaction logs, and transcribed speech) to objectively quantify five defined dimensions of collaboration while providing real-time, context-aware support through an embedded rule-based feedback mechanism. A user study involving 12 autistic-neurotypical pairs demonstrates that VIRTUES can assess and support collaborative efforts across different neurotypes. Through synchronized sensing data, we identified that Information Pooling serves as a critical driving factor for successful collaborative performance. These preliminary findings suggest that VIRTUES provides a foundation for exploring inclusive teamwork and may inform the design of future interventions to support neurodiverse social-technical skill acquisition.