hi everyone thank you for listening today my name is Divine Maloney and i'll
be presenting some exciting work on children and social
virtual reality on behalf of my two advisors doctor Guo Freeman and Dr.
Andrew Robb our paper is titled a virtual space for
all : exploring children's experience in social virtual reality
much of the literature surrounding children in virtual reality has focused
on either educational assistive or medical technologies so vr
for pain management vr for immersive education and vr to
help create tools for children with disabilities
yet few studies have focused on children in commercial virtual reality
applications however children in virtual worlds have
long appeared in hci research and commercial platforms
these platforms are neopets barbie girls club penguin runescape and they all have
very playful designs and child-centered themes
so that takes us to social vr, social vr refers to
3d virtual spaces where multiple users can interact with one another through a
virtual reality head mounted display similar to traditional virtual worlds
such as second life and runescape club penguin
etc but entirely immersive popular platforms include vr chat
all space vr and rec room on these platforms both children and adults
coexist and experience immersive social reality
together
so to further explore children and adults
in social vr in this paper we focus on two research questions
rq1 how do minors perceive and interact with other minors in social vr
and rq2 how do adults and minors perceive and
interact with one another in social vr
our methodology for this was participatory observation
the first author spent a total of 80 hours of participatory observation
in altspaceVR rec room and vr chat he created an account on each platform
and these platforms were chosen as they were the most popular in prior work and
had a broad range of diversity in terms of users and
activities and events the first author attended open public spaces and platform
specific events on each platform screenshots video recordings
and observations handheld voice notes and field notes
were captured during these periods of observations the field
notes were documented immediately after a specific observation session in a
spreadsheet then the three authors collaborated to
examine and review the themes
our findings overall social vr was an enjoyable play experience
children really enjoyed virtual intimacy and emotional connection
and this was by way of hugs or fist bumps or jumping off a ledge and
pretending to catch one another there was also rich interactivity
beyond game play so very rich interpersonal communication
in terms of sharing personal details about themselves or
coping with coving there was also nuanced group behavior so
groups of children exploring different avatar genders
or collaborating together to learn we also observed harassment and bullying
how do adults and minors perceive and interact with one another in social vr
well there were some barriers and tensions and frustrations of coexisting
so adults frequently said kids are
everywhere and they're annoying um however there was mutual learning so
minors adults who perceive minors as equal
really enjoyed the presence and there was a lot of cultural exchange
there was also social distancing between minors and adults
but it varied between platforms some platforms
adults and minors coexisted peacefully and on all the platforms they chose to
distance themselves to one another there was also
some inappropriate content and behavior for children so harassment or
adult sharing mature information and we did observe an instance of virtual rape
so by way of conclusion we want to highlight several implications of our
work first our findings illustrate a few
similarities between social vr traditional worlds such as
the plethora of activities and high levels of engagement however
the uniqueness of social vr seem to support the development of emotional and
interpersonal connections among minors in
a more immersive way and we're not asserting that minors cannot develop
emotional connections in traditional worlds but
our observations demonstrate that minors tended to perceive
their interactions with other minors as even more real
so we also observed traditional harassment and bullying um
between minors in social vr and regarding rq2
adults and miners had a variety of frustrations with one another
and this is not new as it is found in traditional
gameplay between children and adults however due to social vr's immersiveness
adults were more noticeably upset because of the presence of minors
disrupting their social experience the unique interactions between adults
and children are complex and although we did not observe any verbal harassment
between minors and adults we did observe sexual harassment with
little to no consequences for the assaulter and it should be noted
out of 80 plus hours of observation this type of behavior was only occurred
once finally based on our findings we also
propose directions for social vr design to better support children in social vr
so regular practice and implementation exiting vr
experiencing social vr together with loved ones and friends and educating
minors on digital literacy and more safety implications for minors and
cohabitation spaces with adults we hope that our findings contribute to
a better understanding of young people's engagement with technology and points of
future directions for designing safer and more socially satisfying
social vr experience for minors
thank you very much happy to take questions