Comparative Study of Body Doubling in Extended Reality

Body doubling is a mechanism that lets individuals work alongside someone on a monotonous task that they might not be able to focus on when they work alone. The person they work alongside is called a body double. It could be considered similar to co-working, but it gives individuals the freedom to work on anything that they want without feeling obligated to interact with the other person. This research aims to understand if body doubling is helpful to the users and how mixed reality body doubling can be a better addition to the existing mode of in-person and video-call based body doubling. In this work, we have recruited 40 participants to perform a user study where we have done a between-groups comparative study between a no body-double, in-person body double, a video-call based body double, and a mixed reality body double modes. Through these studies, we try to analyze if body doubling is helpful, and if so, which mode the participants are more inclined towards. The work also presents a few suggestions for future improvements.