The ethical design of social Virtual Reality (VR) is not a new topic, but "safety" concerns of using social VR are escalated to a different level given the heat of the Metaverse. For example, it was reported that nearly half of the female-identifying VR participants have had at least one instance of virtual sexual harassment. Feeling safe is a basic human right - in any place, regardless in real or virtual spaces. In this paper, we are seeking to understand the discrepancy between user concerns and designs in protecting user safety in social VR applications. We study safety concerns on social VR experience first by analyzing Twitter posts and then synthesize practices on safety protection adopted by four mainstream social VR platforms. We argue that future research and platforms should explore the design of social VR with boundary-awareness.
@article{arxiv.2204.07121,
title = {Facing the Illusion and Reality of Safety in Social VR},
author = {Qingxiao Zheng and Tue Ngoc Do and Lingqing Wang and Yun Huang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.07121},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
(CHI'EA' 2022) In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Novel Challenges of Safety, Security and Privacy in Extended Reality