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How Are We Shaping Social Interaction in VR?

Surveying the Landscape of Social VR Platforms

By Leigh FisherPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Illustration Courtesy of Mast3r

Up until I started working on my master’s at NYU, I always saw virtual reality strictly as a gaming technology. While applying VR to games is certainly enjoyable and has made for some of the most fun exercise I’ve done in my life, that’s not VR’s only application. Yet just like a good game in VR requires extremely thoughtful game design, crafting other VR experiences, including social ones, requires careful design decisions.

Three researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz dug deep into the mechanics that make socializing in VR successful or disastrous in their paper Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR: An Emerging Design Framework. The team took a close look at Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, Altspace VR, AnyLand, and Facebook Spaces — the latter of which has been discontinued in favor of the work-in-progress Facebook Horizon.

Most VR feature decisions seem to come from industry design knowledge over academic research.

Illustration Courtesy of Mast3r

“Industry design knowledge may be tacit or incomplete, but it fills in important gaps in academic research since industry design experience reflects real world engagement with design choices and grapples with the complex ways that user practices evolve over time.”

— McVeigh-Schultz, Kolesnichenko, & Isbister

I feel like industry design knowledge can sometimes outweigh traditional research in terms of predicting consumer behavior. However, both are valuable. When you mix industry design knowledge and hardcore research, that’s when the magic can really happen. Figuring out new systems, especially social VR opportunities, takes a lot of design theory to engineer.

It’s exciting to see more scholarly research around the VR space. It’s tremendously interesting for someone like me, a hobbyist gamer, to see this technology being looked at under an academic microscope. I still remember when it seemed like the opinion of the masses was that there was no higher value to gaming and VR technology.

Socializing in VR requires a whole new set of social norms.

Illustration Courtesy of Mast3r

For me, one of the most interesting parts of this team’s research was how certain features on certain platforms would encourage interaction. There are a lot of tricks and design hacks, like cozy environments that would be comfortable in real life, that encourage people to relax more in a digital setting.

Though the idea of socializing in an alternative, virtual reality sounds exciting, there are a lot of logistical dilemmas. Beyond that, just as we’ve all had to learn Zoom etiquette in the last year, there’s a lot of VR chat etiquette to learn if you’re going to socialize this way.

When looking at communicative affordances and social mechanics, the research team found some very awkward circumstances that can crop up when socializing in VR.

“Handshake gestures came up among several of our interviewees as an area of some complexity since in many of the platforms the handshake doubles as a friending mechanism. Unintended friending along with the social pressure to friend can be quite problematic. Friending is also complicated due to the function of real time virtual presence combined with the expectation of reciprocity, which together makes for a socially awkward combination.”

— McVeigh-Schultz, Kolesnichenko, & Isbister

The idea of accidental friending does make my introverted soul cringe a bit! Regardless, it presents a unique design challenge. With a limited amount of gestures or button inputs, it’s really hard to create a comfortable user experience in VR. It demands a lot more thought than typical screen-based interfaces.

Easy access might just be key to making social VR platforms mainstream.

Illustration Courtesy of Mast3r

“Especially for closed social VR experiences with existing friends, place priority on device interoperability, so that those who are novices can join without high end equipment.”

— McVeigh-Schultz, Kolesnichenko, & Isbister

I both agree and disagree with this idea the researchers put forth. On one hand, if assets aren’t too heavy and VR experiences can be loaded on a wide variety of devices, more people will be able to use them. In terms of the ability to try it out, this certainly makes sense.

However, experiencing VR in an incomplete or very scaled-down way can be underwhelming to participants. It may seem so visually plain that the person doesn’t have a strong interest to go back. While high-end gaming PC or recent VR headset, you can experience a virtual world in a much more realistic way. However, there is a smaller potential audience if these niche devices are necessary. I couldn’t say what the real answer is, but it’s something I’m interested in exploring more.

It’s an interesting study, but it was sponsored by Mozilla.

Illustration Courtesy of Mast3r

I admittedly always get a little more critical when I read research with a potential conflict of interest. From my days of working on the administrative side of medicine, I’ve got a grim firsthand knowledge of how much sponsorship can taint the methods and results of a research study. The paper doesn’t seem to over highlight or exalt Mozilla Hubs, but it’s worth taking a mental note.

The researchers end on a very optimistic note.

“In the future, social VR platforms may have the kind of broad impact on society that contemporary 2D social media currently maintain.”

— McVeigh-Schultz, Kolesnichenko, & Isbister

On one hand, I would love to see this come to pass. There were many times when reading Ready Player One that certain Oasis features had me thinking "sign me up!" However, I also feel like the popularity of VR hasn’t been quite as explosive as I thought it would be by now with fairly affordable headsets on the market.

Either way, I hope this research team’s optimism holds true. I’m intrigued by the potential of VR as a social experience and as a storytelling mechanism. It’s a fascinating technology with so much potential for a wide berth of experiences.

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About the Creator

Leigh Fisher

I'm a writer, bookworm, sci-fi space cadet, and coffee+tea fanatic living in Brooklyn. I have an MS in Integrated Design & Media (go figure) and I'm working on my MFA in Fiction at NYU. I share poetry on Instagram as @SleeplessAuthoress.

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