Navigating familiar spaces: the mediating role of trust in shaping engagement within collaborative Metaverse

The Metaverse shows significant potential to support collaboration by enabling immersive virtual environments for collective work and learning. However, its effectiveness is often limited by a lack of user trust and engagement. By contextualizing and extending the interactionist theory of place attachment, this study theorizes spatial familiarity as a core feature of Metaverse, examining its mechanisms for fostering perceptions of virtual environments as reliable and engaging places for collaboration. With this end in view, this research followed a sequential mixed-methods approach, with the qualitative method first developing the context-specific research model by identifying key factors that enable Metaverse-based collaboration, and then the quantitative method validating the model. The results together indicate that the spatial familiarity of Metaverse enables individuals to engage in virtual environments for collaboration both directly and mediated by trust. Importantly, the efficacy of spatial familiarity is particularly pronounced when a person perceives a high level of avatar human-likeness but diminishes when her self-regulation is high. By uncovering the theoretical mechanisms through which spatial stimuli contribute to trust-building in collaborative Metaverse contexts, this study also offers practical implications for designing and managing virtual environments for collaborative purposes.