Large-scale natural language analysis
Millions of social media posts analyzed to inductively understand how people express virtual-meeting well-being, equity concerns, and emotional experience.
We investigate why virtual meetings tire us, design platforms that don't, and build the research tools to prove the difference. Our work spans communication, human-computer interaction, game studies, and educational technology.
Beyond Meet Space is a research collective born in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when videoconferencing became the default fabric of professional and academic life, and its limitations became everyone's problem. We've spent the past six years studying what makes virtual meetings tiring, inequitable, and disconnected, and designing what they could become instead.
The group spans communication, human-computer interaction, game studies, and educational technology, with principal investigators at six universities and current collaborators across industry, academia, and XR practice.
principal investigators across 6 institutions
peer-reviewed publications since 2022
coordinated studies across the research program
guest-edited journal special issues
Each study informs the others. Findings from large-scale text analysis shape survey design; survey results guide interview questions; all four primary studies feed a prototype platform designed, tested, and refined by the community it serves.
Millions of social media posts analyzed to inductively understand how people express virtual-meeting well-being, equity concerns, and emotional experience.
Several thousand remote workers surveyed, stratified by gender and race, testing how platform features and individual attributes relate to fatigue, adoption, and equity outcomes.
Game-development professionals interviewed to interpret broader insights within diverse remote-work teams. Themes: play, representation, identity negotiation in virtual work.
Hypothesis-driven experimental testing of meeting features and affordances, derived from Studies 1–3. Ongoing qualitative analysis of the focus-group corpus.
Beyond Meet Space itself: built in Unity, hosted in VRChat, open to everyone. Findings from the other four studies shape its values-based design. Try it →
An annual conference (Meaningful XR), two journal special issues, the publicly accessible research platform, and an open invitation to industry and academic colleagues.
A meta-analysis of 38 studies identified "feeling trapped" as the strongest predictor of videoconferencing fatigue (r = .33).
Women and people of color place significantly higher value on avatar customization in virtual workplaces, a measurable differential equity signal.
Playful design elements like gesture tools, stylized environments, and ambient virtual objects reduce fatigue and increase engagement.
This research program was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier Research Program: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers.
The grant period is complete. The research continues.
We're between funded chapters, actively developing our next research program. The questions that drew us together in 2019 (about equity, presence, play, and human well-being in mediated work) have only grown more urgent as AI agents, spatial computing, and hybrid work models continue to reshape the landscape.
If you're a scholar, platform designer, or funding organization interested in the next generation of virtual meeting research, grounded in equity, game studies, and values-based design, we'd like to hear from you.