The dataset is a collection of video recordings of interactions between co-participants in a commercial social virtual reality (VR) environment called Rec Room (https://recroom.com). Rec Room is a room-scale and multiplayer game environment. It resembles a virtual recreational center where users can socialize and play games such as dodgeball, paintball, 3D charades and disc golf. The recordings were collected in a quasi-experimental setting as part of an advanced university course on digitally mediated social interaction. The recordings were made in October 2016. Twelve volunteers (i.e., six pairs), who were not students in the course, were invited to interact in Rec Room and be video recorded for research purposes. In the recordings, the participants explore Rec Room and its features and play different games. They also have encounters with online, remote participants in the virtual environment. Some of the pairs knew each prior to the recordings, while some of them had not met before. The players used the following technology: A wearable headset (HTC Vive) with an integrated microphone and earphones; hand-held controllers (HTC Vive). Two beacons monitor the headset and the controllers, tracking and replicating the players’ movement in the virtual world. In the virtual world, the players appear and interact as avatars. They can manipulate objects in the virtual world with the controllers. They can also move short distances in a constrained space. More extensive movement in the virtual world is possible by teleportation. Apart from one, the participants were non-native English speakers, with different language backgrounds. The language in the recordings is English as a lingua franca. All participants gave their informed consent for using the data in research and related publications, with personal information (names and faces) changed from the transcripts and other representations. The research materials include screen recordings from the participants’ first-person perspective to the virtual environment. In addition, the participants are video recorded in the physical environment where they are co-present with their pair and the research staff collecting the data. The audio (i.e. the game sounds and the players’ talk) was collected from the game and the physical space. Software called Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) was used to capture the in-game audio the video projection of the virtual world. A ‘ladybug’ camera (MORE system) was used to record 360° video with high resolution and multichannel wireless audio (see Keskinarkaus et al. 2016). The duration of each of the six recordings is 30–60 minutes. In sum, with three video streams from each pair, the total duration of the recordings is approx. 20 hours.

2024