Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening today.
My name is Divine Maloney and I'll be presenting some exciting work on the types of activities
people enjoying social virtual reality.
This is on behalf of my advisor, Dr. Freeman . Our paper is titled falling asleep together,
what makes activities and social virtual reality meaningful to users.
Early social activities were first seen in muds, or multi user dungeons and have since
evolved to a broader range of activities such as groups and intimate experiences or experimentation
through virtual avatars.
And now with the dawn of social VR, what sorts of activities do people participate in?
And so social VR refers to 3d virtual spaces where multiple users can interact with one
another through virtual reality head mounted displays, similar to traditional virtual worlds
such as second life and runescape, Club Penguin, but entirely immersive.
so popular VR platforms include VR chat, AltspaceVR, in rec room, and in these spaces, people can
participate in all the traditional types of activity seen in traditional virtual worlds
such as you know those groups and intimate experiences.
And they have more control over their personal avatar because it mimics their movements,
they can control it with their their bodies to soul interface.
So to further explore the nuance of activities and interactions in social VR, we focus on
two research questions are rq1, what are the important and novel social activities across
different social VR platform platforms, according to users?
And what makes these activities meaningful to them?
RQ2 what are the users recommendations for designing social VR to better support such
activities?
To collect data, we conducted 30 interviews with social VR users of diverse genders, diverse
races and diverse experiences of social VR platforms.
We then use an in depth qualitative analysis to analyze the data.
So to answer our key one, we found that people really enjoyed full body mirroring activities
where their body was the sole interface of the experience.
So participating in dancing or more intimate interpersonal connections.
They also enjoyed very mundane activities, they got to experience them in new ways.
So sleeping or sleeping together with one another, right?
Also, they enjoyed activities for mental self improvement.
So being able to practice social skills and, and doing this as a form of empowerment.
There was also a lot of cultural exchange and appreciation for diverse immersive events
outside of entertainment.
So people really enjoyed interacting with different people of different countries in
a more immersive manner.
And there were activities such as programming workshops, or user experience workshops, and
also guided meditations that they could take part in that weren't solely about entertainment.
But education tends to argue too, we found that improving social connectivity was huge,
and it needs to be considered by balancing the accessibility and customization of the
specific platform.
So increasing intimate connectivity, but also attracting more people into social VR.
There is also a push for communication both in and out of VR.
So people want to be able to leave messages to their friends when they're out of VR, but
also message other people while they're outside of VR.
When they're in the platform.
There was also a wanting for more realistic interactions and environments.
By way of conclusion, we want to highlight several implications of our work.
First, our findings illustrate a few similarities between social VR and traditional virtual
worlds.
One similarity was the broad range of educational entertainment and self improvement across
both traditional virtual worlds and in social VR.
However, social VR also extended capabilities of traditional virtual worlds as it affords
the communication and interpretation of rich social cues such as posture, gesture, and
voice annotation.
And that was probably why we saw people practicing their social skills.
One key difference is that the affordance of full body track avatars, which allow for
mundane activities, such as sleeping in traditional worlds, participants would you know in traditional
virtual worlds they would forget to sleep but our participants chose to intentionally
fall asleep in social VR.
Additionally, the enhanced social connectivity and self reflection we attribute this to the
nuance of social of virtual reality where literature suggests that the enhanced presence,
immersion and embodiment encourages self reflection and connectivity between oneself and the existing
world around them.
Finally, we suggest three user generated design implications, participatory design, so proactively
involving people with disabilities and marginalized communities in the process of social VR and
digital activities.
Also designing virtual spaces and social VR for social support to combat harassment and
share experiences with one another.
And finally crafting an onboarding process to explore the accessibility of the platform.
We hope that these design implications can better support a more equitable and safe and
enjoyable social VR.
Thank you so much.
I'm happy to take any questions.