Educational institutions orchestrate a variety of in-school events and activities to enrich the student experience. Given their benefits, it is crucial to encourage student participation. With the recent advent of the metaverse, there is an opportunity to engage students due to their inclination toward adopting such technologies. However, the dynamics of celebrating school events within these virtual worlds remain largely unexplored. Our study sought to address this gap by examining school event celebrations in the metaverse through an appreciative inquiry approach. During Valentine's Day, we introduced a special edition of our educational metaverse (i.e., MILES Virtual World) tailored to celebrate the occasion. We discovered that conducting school events in the metaverse requires the integration of real-life social rituals to augment students' social experiences and foster a sense of community. Moreover, the need for realism and the mirroring of real-world traditions in virtual settings emerged as critical drivers for creating more emotionally satisfying and engaging user experiences. The challenge of encouraging student participation in physical events parallels the issue encountered in virtual worlds, where students may feel discouraged from participating if they do not observe their friends' presence within the metaverse. Our study also calls for collective engagement in shaping the virtual world to ensure more inclusive, engaging, and enriched educational metaverses. As we continue to navigate the evolving landscape of immersive digital environments, the insights gained from our research underscore the importance of collaboration, innovation, and student agency in shaping the future of education.

Social relationships are important to human well-being and interaction. Recently, there has been growing interest in how they are formed in various digital media, including social media and video games. Amid the rise of digital engagement, the metaverse has emerged as an essential virtual environment for social interaction. Unfortunately, there is limited understanding of how social relationships are developed and maintained within the metaverse. In this study, we explored the dynamics of social relationship development in a metaverse world. Using a one-shot case study, we assessed the roles of immersion and embodiment, as well as the moderating effect of copresence, in building social relationships through multiple regression analysis. Our findings show that with higher levels of immersion and embodiment, the formation of social relationships in the metaverse is significantly improved. Copresence further intensifies these effects, which is indicative of its crucial role in virtual social interactions. These results indicate that enhancing the immersion, embodiment, and copresence elements in metaverse environments can encourage stronger social bonds among users. Overall, this study advances our understanding of online social relationship formation in the metaverse environments and its design and development.

Immersive technologies have generated significant interest across various academic disciplines. The necessity for more authentic, interactive, and immersive artificial environments led to the growing popularity of the metaverse. Unfortunately, not all metaverse types have been broadly covered in educational research. This inadequacy highlights a gap in understanding the potential benefits and drawbacks of metaverse technologies for education. To address this research gap, we created a metaverse called “MILES Virtual World” that embodies the concepts of lifelogging and mirror worlds. Following the principles of the Embodied Social Presence Theory, the application allows students to socialize through customizable avatars and engage in a variety of activities that closely resemble those in the physical world. We adopted a mixed-method approach using a convergent parallel design to evaluate the application. Our quantitative analysis reveals that students feel highly present and engaged in the virtual environment, with a sense of agency and immersion. It also underscores the importance of enhancing embodiment and copresence to create more effective virtual world experiences and opportunities for social interactions. Meanwhile, our qualitative analysis uncovers several underlying subthemes, including avatar customization, identity exploration, virtual items, communication, entertainment, autonomy, freedom of expression, realism, challenges, shared experiences, and a sense of belonging within the metaverse. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the potential of metaverse technology in the educational context, and how it can be harnessed to create more effective and engaging academic experiences for students.