The Timing of Breaks for Resilience: Collective Recovery in Multi-User Virtual Reality

The pursuit of seamlessness in collaborative VR often creates a paradox: concealing technical failures generates asymmetric awareness, fracturing the shared reality essential for teamwork. We argue instead that disruption timing acts as an information structure. Drawing on the theory of rational rituals, we posit that a simultaneous onset creates a Public, Synchronous, Bounded (PSB) anchor that establishes common knowledge. We tested this framework with 34 triads (N = 102) performing interdependent tasks. Results show that simultaneous disruptions significantly accelerated Time-to-Recovery (TTR) and preserved role stability by enabling a compact A–R–E sequence (affect-check, reorientation, re-entry). Conversely, asynchronous onsets caused epistemic fragmentation and role churn. We contribute the coordination wrapper, a design strategy that transforms inevitable system failures into synthetic PSB cues, shifting the paradigm from error minimization to resilient recovery.