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What's It Mean to "Be Social" in VR?: Mapping the Social VR Design Ecology

Published: 30 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The emerging ecology of commercial social VR currently includes a diverse set of applications and competing models of what it means to be social in VR. This study maps a slice of this ecology, comparing and contrasting ways different applications frame, support, shape, or constrain social interaction. We deploy a method of design-oriented autobiographical landscape research to examine five platforms: Facebook Spaces, Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, and AltspaceVR. We analyze design choices underlying these environments and draw attention to issues of space and place, locomotion, and social mechanics. Drawing on this analysis, we identify key issues and concerns for future research and design in social VR.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIS '18 Companion: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems
May 2018
436 pages
ISBN:9781450356312
DOI:10.1145/3197391
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 30 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. embodiment
  2. social vr
  3. virtual reality

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DIS '18 Companion Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 487 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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  • (2024)Virtual Reality Bank: A Novel Banking Experience in Immersive WorldProceedings of the 26th Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality10.1145/3691573.3691576(193-202)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Social VR for Professional Networking: A Spatial PerspectiveProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/3677386.3682094(1-10)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2024)The Alt-Self: Investigating the Inclusivity of Self-Avatar Representations in Social VRCompanion Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3665463.3678783(131-138)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
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  • (2024)Disembodied, Asocial, and Unreal: How Users Reinterpret Designed Affordances of Social VRProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661548(1914-1925)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)The Impact of Task-Responsibility on User Experience and Behaviour under Asymmetric Knowledge ConditionsProceedings of the 30th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology10.1145/3641825.3687721(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2024
  • (2024)SocialCueSwitch: Towards Customizable Accessibility by Representing Social Cues in Multiple SensesExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651109(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)“I’d rather drink in VRChat”: Understanding Drinking in Social Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642405(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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