“I Don't Want to Hide Behind an Avatar”: Self-Representation in Social VR Among Women in Midlife

Abstract

Social virtual reality (VR) avatars hold promise for allowing people to represent themselves as they want to be seen. But most social VR environments constrain avatar options in ways that limit the accurate presentation of age and promote the assumption of youth. Through individual interviews with ten women in midlife, we explore experiences representing age and other aspects of identity in social VR. Participants expressed a desire to show age and gender with increased nuance: they sought more gradations of color, texture, and body types, and disliked the hypersexualization that resulted from integrated clothing and body parts. As they customized their avatars, participants struggled to depict both physical and personal characteristics, taking into account how others might evaluate their self-perception. These findings highlight opportunities for nuanced representations of physical attributes as well as options for representing the self at other levels: psychological, social, and aesthetic.