Abstract
This paper presents interim results from an ongoing study investigating VR-mediated hybrid communication using commercial conferencing platforms under controlled packet-loss conditions. We examine how network degradation affects both perceived audiovisual quality and task-based communication performance in a gesture-based interaction task. Results show that while Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) decrease gradually with increasing packet loss, task performance remains stable up to 10% packet loss before declining sharply at higher impairment levels, indicating a possible communication breakdown threshold. Communication effort also increased with packet loss, rising sharply at higher impairment levels alongside the marked drop in task performance. This suggests one practical barrier to everyday adoption: users may experience systems as only moderately degraded while the communication channel needed for the task is already becoming unreliable. More broadly, these interim findings indicate that subjective quality measures alone may not reflect whether a system remains effective for its intended task. CCS Concepts • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collab-orative and social computing.