So, this JCMC paper covers two studies and it was done with my brilliant colleagues, Mark Miller, Cyan DeVeaux, Hanseul Jun, Kristine Nowak, who's here with us today, Jeff Hancock, Nilam Ram, and Jeremy Bailenson. We conducted these studies during a course offered here at Stanford where around 100 students took part in the first course and around 170 took part in the second course. We ran the study over a period of eight weeks for each course. For our first study, we focused on self representation. So, what happens if we transform what you look like when you're interacting with others inside VR? Students were either in an avatar that looked and felt like themselves or they were in a uniform avatar that allowed everyone to look the same. In our second study, we focused on environmental context. So, what happens if you're in a world that's outdoors surrounded by nature or indoors in a room that feels very constraining? Students were in 1 of 192 possible virtual worlds that were either indoors or outdoors and either panoramic or constrained. For the study, we sent each student in the course a Meta Quest 2 Headset and using these headsets students met inside this social VR platform called Engage, which allows people to interact with one another in real time as avatars. Students met in groups for about half an hour each week for around eight weeks total and they engaged in discussion and took part in some physical activities. During this time, we collected various forms of data before and after the course, during the VR sessions, and right after each VR session as well. And we collected self-report data on measures such as: how much presence there were feeling, how connected they felt to their group members, how photographically real things looked. We also collected motion data as well as verbal data. Then we took this data and then we build a linear growth model that would show us how these various measures changed over time and how they changed for different types of people as they grew more familiar with using VR. In study one, where we manipulated avatar appearance, many of the measures that we collected increased over time. So entitativity, or groupness, presence, enjoyment, and realism all increased over time. That helped us realize that time plays a really critical role in how people's experience in VR evolves. People adapt to the medium and they're able to really reap the benefits, such as presence and enjoyment. We also found that when students were in avatars that looked and felt like themselves, there was increased synchrony, which is similarities in moment-to-moment nonverbal behaviors between a pair of participants. Meanwhile, if students were in a uniform avatar, they reported feeling lower self-presence and perceived the virtual environment, and others, as being less photorealistic but at the same time they also reported feeling greater enjoyment. In study two, where we manipulated the environment, we found that as there was more visible space, there was more nonverbal synchrony and people reported feeling more restored by the environment. They reported a greater sense of self and spatial presence, enjoyment, and realism. In other words, the more space you could see, the more benefits there are. And similarly, when environments were outdoors, students reported feeling more restored by the environment and felt greater enjoyment, which is very in line with previous research findings on the restorative properties of nature. Before these studies, during the height of the pandemic, there was this great interest in using VR as a tool to host remote activities and courses. So, for part of Kristine's class, we ran a smaller and slightly different version of what I just described in these two large long studies. Kristine sent Pico Neo headsets, we ran a study, we collected measures and so on. What was really key here was the qualitative findings that really helped us prepare for the JCMC studies. In these qualitative findings, we found that it's really critical to provide a lot of training time to allow students to grow accustomed to the medium before investigating how responses to VR changes. One of the pillars of our JCMC paper was the critical role time plays and how people's behaviors change over time. A second thing that we learned was that task type and content is important. We tried our best to choose activities that would reduce cognitive load and also encourage social interaction. So, this pilot study was really helpful in helping us choose what kind of tasks we wanted to do in VR. The last thing is also how long we wanted our sessions to be. Should they be short, 10 minutes? Or should they be really long, like hours long? In our JCMC studies, our sessions were 30 minutes long. We were able to choose this time, not only because of previous research findings on people becoming motion sick after the 25-minute mark, but also from Kristine's pilot study where we realized 45 minutes might be too long but if it's too short then students would not really be able to become familiar with it.