New extended reality technologies, including virtual, augmented and mixed realities have recently matured as a technology and are increasingly adopted for industries. The major beneficial use cases are now witnessed for remote collaboration due to overriding the limitations of traditional IT tools, bringing the collaborators in the same shared space and collaborating over 3D content, similar than in face to face settings. This is referred to as Social Extended Reality (SXR), which allows multiple users to interact with each other simultaneously in an immersive way in the same virtual space via avatars. SXR has the potential to increase organizational performance by improving collaboration between different stakeholders in industry value chains and by enabling efficient collaboration in situations in which physical meetings are not possible. The presentation will focus on insights about the potentials of SXR and discuss factors that either enable or disrupt its adoption.

Henri Pirkkalainen is an associate professor of Information and Knowledge Management in Tampere University. His research interest is in technology adoption, dark side of information systems use and knowledge management. Pirkkalainen manages national projects on AR and VR by collaborating actively with the leading technology companies in Finland. These national, company-funded projects are specifically related to adoption of AR and VR in industries. The team of Assistant Professor Pirkkalainen is currently working on new types of social VR application and scenarios which enable multiple users to collaborate andeducateeachotherinVRenvironments. Pirkkalainenhaspublishedinmanyoftheleading journals listed by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and has chaired and acted as an associate editor for many AIS conferences.