Comparing Social Interactions in Metaverse and Video Conferencing: Preliminary Insights of a Laboratory Experiment

Collaboration between team members increasingly occurs online, where digital technologies enable individuals to share their thoughts and ideas to make joint decisions. The metaverse is often regarded as one of the most promising ways to facilitate such decisions. In this research, we empirically compare teamwork in the metaverse with online collaboration in a 2D computer-mediated environment (i.e., Microsoft Teams). The aim of this research is to replicate the findings of Hennig-Thurau et al.’s (2022) field experiments and extend them by shedding light on the role of additional explanatory variables (e.g., flow, information overload) and outcomes. Preliminary results of our lab experiment show that concerning the perceived collaboration outcomes (e.g., satisfaction with task outcomes, satisfaction with the task process, perceived creativity, positive/negative emotions), no significant difference between the two collaboration types (3D vs. 2D) could be found. However, our current research status suggests that the two digital channels affect individuals differently in terms of the perceived exhaustion (i.e., stress). Overall, the first findings imply that value creation in the metaverse – at least for a creative team task – can be problematic.