Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR

TLDR

Commercial social VR applications form a diverse and evolving ecosystem with competing models of what it means to be social in VR. This paper examines how creators of social VR platforms think about framing, supporting, shaping, or constraining social interaction, based on expert interviews. The authors interview industry experts and analyze seven commercial social VR platforms—Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, Altspace VR, AnyLand, and Facebook Spaces—to contextualize design choices around aesthetics, embodied affordances, social mechanics, and tactics for shaping norms and mitigating harassment. The study highlights the stakes of these design choices, proposes future research directions, and introduces an emerging design framework for shaping pro‑social behavior in VR.

Abstract

Commercial social VR applications represent a diverse and evolving ecology with competing models of what it means to be social in VR. Drawing from expert interviews, this paper examines how the creators of different social VR applications think about how their platforms frame, support, shape, or constrain social interaction. The study covers a range of applications including: Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, Altspace VR, AnyLand, and Facebook Spaces. We contextualize design choices underlying these applications, with particular attention paid to the ways that industry experts perceive, and seek to shape, the relationship between user experiences and design choices. We underscore considerations related to: (1) aesthetics of place (2) embodied affordances, (3) social mechanics, (4) and tactics for shaping social norms and mitigating harassment. Drawing on this analysis, we discuss the stakes of these choices, suggest future research directions, and propose an emerging design framework for shaping pro-social behavior in VR.