Abstract
Immersive virtual reality (VR) has seen growth in usage over the last few years and that growth is expected to accelerate. Correspondingly, many VR-based online communities have begun to emerge, and several social VR applications such as AltspaceVR have gained significant popularity. However, virtual reality can be isolating. Users can meet and connect with people in VR, but inevitably, when a user removes their headset, their friends are no longer there. In this paper, we look at how communities in AltspaceVR, a popular social VR application, handle this challenge. We conduct fourteen interviews and over 70 hours of participant observation and find that AltspaceVR users and communities have turned to Discord to solve many of their needs, such as facilitating more ubiquitous communication, planning community activities and AltspaceVR Events, and hosting casual social discussion. By using the communicative ecology model for our analysis, we find that AltspaceVR, Discord, and the communities that intersect the two have formed a tightly-coupled communicative ecology, which we call the "stage" and "theater". Discord acts as the "theater," where actors and crew collaborate and communicate to prepare for the main event, all the while building important social bonds. AltspaceVR acts as the "stage," where those efforts manifest in ephemeral but high-value experiences that bring the community together. Finally, we compare the communities we studied with those found in massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and provide insights regarding the design of social VR applications and online communities.
- Thomas Alsop. 2021. Virtual reality (VR) - statistics & facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/2532/virtual-reality-vr/#dossierKeyfiguresGoogle Scholar
- AltspaceVR. 2016. Send messages in AltspaceVR. https://altvr.com/send-messages-in-altspacevr/Google Scholar
- AltspaceVR. 2021. Empowered Hosting: FrontRow Expansion, Room Cap Increases, and Updates to Channels. https://altvr.com/more-host-tools/Google Scholar
- AltspaceVR. 2021. Introducing the Altspace Uploader. IntroducingtheAltspaceUploaderGoogle Scholar
- AltspaceVR. 2021. Managing worlds. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/altspace-vr/world-building/managing-worldsGoogle Scholar
- AltspaceVR. 2022. Build Worlds. https://altvr.com/guide-section/build-worlds/Google Scholar
- Gary Bente, Sabine Rüggenberg, Nicole C. Krämer, and Felix Eschenburg. 2008. Avatar-Mediated Networking: Increasing Social Presence and Interpersonal Trust in Net-Based Collaborations. Human Communication Research 34, 2 (04 2008), 287--318. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468--2958.2008.00322.x arXiv:https://academic.oup.com/hcr/article-pdf/34/2/287/22325251/jhumcom0287.pdfGoogle ScholarCross Ref
- Frank Biocca, Chad Harms, and Judee K Burgoon. 2003. Toward a more robust theory and measure of social presence: Review and suggested criteria. Presence: Teleoperators & virtual environments 12, 5 (2003), 456--480.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lindsay Blackwell, Nicole Ellison, Natasha Elliott-Deflo, and Raz Schwartz. 2019. Harassment in social virtual reality: Challenges for platform governance. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW (2019), 1--25.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology 3, 2 (2006), 77--101.Google Scholar
- BRCvr. 2021. BRCvr - An Official Virtual Burning Man Experience. https://brcvr.org/Google Scholar
- Amy Bruckman. 1998. Community support for constructionist learning. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 7, 1 (1998), 47--86.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Josh Constine. 2015. VR chat ROOM altspacevr Raises $10.3m to sell virtual events. https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/29/pay-per-virtual-reality/Google Scholar
- Emmelyn AJ Croes, Marjolijn L Antheunis, Alexander P Schouten, and Emiel J Krahmer. 2016. Teasing apart the effect of visibility and physical co-presence to examine the effect of CMC on interpersonal attraction. Computers in Human Behavior 55 (2016), 468--476.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Discord. 2022. DISCORD'S TERMS OF SERVICE. https://discord.com/terms#1Google Scholar
- Nicolas Ducheneaut, Robert J Moore, and Eric Nickell. 2004. Designing for sociability in massively multiplayer games: an examination of the ?third places" of SWG. In Conf. Proceedings for Other Players, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, DK.Google Scholar
- Nicolas Ducheneaut, Robert J Moore, and Eric Nickell. 2007. Virtual "third places": A case study of sociability in massively multiplayer games. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 16, 1 (2007), 129--166.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J Moore. 2007. The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in world of warcraft. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human factors in computing systems. 839--848.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Leighton Evans. 2018. The Re-Emergence of Virtual Reality. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351009324Google ScholarCross Ref
- Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym. 2020. Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 042 (may 2020), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marcus Foth and Greg Hearn. 2007. Networked individualism of urban residents: Discovering the communicative ecology in inner-city apartment buildings. Information, communication & society 10, 5 (2007), 749--772.Google Scholar
- Guo Freeman, Samaneh Zamanifard, Divine Maloney, and Alexandra Adkins. 2020. My body, my avatar: How people perceive their avatars in social virtual reality. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--8.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maia Garau, Mel Slater, Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy, Andrea Brogni, Anthony Steed, and M Angela Sasse. 2003. The impact of avatar realism and eye gaze control on perceived quality of communication in a shared immersive virtual environment. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human factors in computing systems. 529--536.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Werner Geyser. 2021. Discord Statistics: Revenue, Users & More. https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/Google Scholar
- Joseph A. Gonzales, Casey Fiesler, and Amy Bruckman. 2015. Towards an Appropriable CSCW Tool Ecology: Lessons from the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (Vancouver, BC, Canada) (CSCW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 946--957. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675240Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alicia Iriberri and Gondy Leroy. 2009. A life-cycle perspective on online community success. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 41, 2 (2009), 1--29.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jialun Aaron Jiang, Charles Kiene, Skyler Middler, Jed R. Brubaker, and Casey Fiesler. 2019. Moderation Challenges in Voice-Based Online Communities on Discord. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 55 (nov 2019), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359157Google ScholarDigital Library
- Charles Kiene, Jialun Aaron Jiang, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2019. Technological frames and user innovation: exploring technological change in community moderation teams. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW (2019), 1--23.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amy Jo Kim. 2006. Community building on the web: Secret strategies for successful online communities. Peachpit press.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anya Kolesnichenko, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Katherine Isbister. 2019. Understanding emerging design practices for avatar systems in the commercial social vr ecology. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conf. 241--252.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Myungho Lee, Gerd Bruder, and Gregory F Welch. 2017. Exploring the effect of vibrotactile feedback through the floor on social presence in an immersive virtual environment. In 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR). IEEE, 105--111.Google Scholar
- Jan Marco Leimeister, Pascal Sidiras, and Helmut Krcmar. 2004. Success factors of virtual communities from the perspective of members and operators: An empirical study. In 37th Annual Hawaii International Conf. on System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the. IEEE, 10--pp.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jie Li, Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy, Julie Williamson, David A Shamma, and Pablo Cesar. 2021. Social VR: A New medium for remote communication and collaboration. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--6.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Peter Lyle, Henrik Korsgaard, and Susanne Bødker. 2020. What's in an Ecology? A Review of Artifact, Communicative, Device and Information Ecologies. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420185Google ScholarDigital Library
- Divine Maloney and Guo Freeman. 2020. Falling Asleep Together: What Makes Activities in Social Virtual Reality Meaningful to Users. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (Virtual Event, Canada) (CHI PLAY '20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 510--521. https://doi.org/10.1145/3410404.3414266Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Kolesnichenko, and Katherine Isbister. 2019. Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR: An Emerging Design Framework. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland Uk) (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300794Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nemanja Memarovic, Marc Langheinrich, Elisa Rubegni, Andreia David, and Ivan Elhart. 2012. Designing" interacting places" for a student community using a communicative ecology approach. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conf. on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. 1--10.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tim Montrief, Mary RC Haas, Michael Gottlieb Al'ai Alvarez, Deborah Siegal, and Teresa Chan. 2021. Thinking outside the inbox: use of Slack in clinical groups as a collaborative team communication platform. AEM Education and Training 5, 1 (2021), 121.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Fares Moustafa and Anthony Steed. 2018. A Longitudinal Study of Small Group Interaction in Social Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (Tokyo, Japan) (VRST '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 22, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3281505.3281527Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris. 2006. Strangers and friends: Collaborative play in World of Warcraft. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary Conf. on Computer supported cooperative work. 149--158.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lisa Newon. 2011. Multimodal creativity and identities of expertise in the digital ecology of a World of Warcraft guild. Digital discourse: Language in the new media 131 (2011).Google Scholar
- Catherine S Oh, Jeremy N Bailenson, and Gregory F Welch. 2018. A systematic review of social presence: Definition, antecedents, and implications. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 5 (2018), 114.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ramon Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett. 1982. The third place. Qualitative sociology 5, 4 (1982), 265--284.Google Scholar
- Nicola S Schutte and Emma J Stilinovic. 2017. Facilitating empathy through virtual reality. Motivation and emotion 41, 6 (2017), 708--712.Google Scholar
- A Fleming Seay, William J Jerome, Kevin Sang Lee, and Robert E Kraut. 2004. Project Massive: A study of online gaming communities. In CHI'04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. 1421--1424.Google Scholar
- Constance A Steinkuehler and Dmitri Williams. 2006. Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as ?third places". Journal of computer-mediated communication 11, 4 (2006), 885--909.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jonathan Steuer. 1992. Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal of Communication 42, 4 (1992), 73--93.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Thea Turner, Pernilla Qvarfordt, Jacob T Biehl, Gene Golovchinsky, and Maribeth Back. 2010. Exploring the workplace communication ecology. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conf. on human factors in computing systems. 841--850.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Thea Turner, Pernilla Qvarfordt, Jacob T. Biehl, Gene Golovchinsky, and Maribeth Back. 2010. Exploring the Workplace Communication Ecology. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 841--850. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753449Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lionel Sujay Vailshery. 2021. Number of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) users in the United States from 2017 to 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1017008/united-states-vr-ar-users/Google Scholar
- Greg Wadley, Martin Gibbs, and Peter Benda. 2007. Speaking in character: using voice-over-IP to communicate within MMORPGs. In Proceedings of the 4th Australasian Conf. on Interactive entertainment. 1--8.Google Scholar
- Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell. 2006. From tree house to barracks: The social life of guilds in World of Warcraft. Games and culture 1, 4 (2006), 338--361.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mansooreh Zahedi, Mojtaba Shahin, and Muhammad Ali Babar. 2016. A systematic review of knowledge sharing challenges and practices in global software development. International Journal of Information Management 36, 6, Part A (2016), 995--1019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.06.007Google ScholarDigital Library
- Samaneh Zamanifard and Guo Freeman. 2019. "The Togetherness That We Crave": Experiencing Social VR in Long Distance Relationships. In Conf. Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Austin, TX, USA) (CSCW '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 438--442. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311957.3359453Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- The Stage and the Theatre: AltspaceVR and its Relationship to Discord
Recommendations
Harassment in Social Virtual Reality: Challenges for Platform Governance
In immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, experiences of harassment can be exacerbated by features such as synchronous voice chat, heightened feelings of presence and embodiment, and avatar movements that can feel like violations of personal space (...
Go-Through: Disabling Collision to Access Obstructed Paths and Open Occluded Views in Social VR
AHs '20: Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International ConferenceSocial Virtual Reality (VR) offers new opportunities for designing social experiences, but at the same time, it challenges the usability of VR as other avatars can block paths and occlude one's avatar's view. In contrast to designing VR similar to the ...
A Virtual Space for All: Exploring Children's Experience in Social Virtual Reality
CHI PLAY '20: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in PlaySocial virtual reality (VR) is increasingly becoming an emerging online social ecosystem where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays in 3Dvirtual spaces. The co-existence of minors and adults in social VR presents ...
Comments