Systematic Literature Review of Using Virtual Reality as a Social Platform in HCI Community

TL;DR

It is found that VR influences social interaction through self-representation, interpersonal interactions, and interaction environments, and it is shown that it could also negatively affect user social experiences by intensifying harassment experiences and amplifying privacy concerns.

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as a social platform for users to interact and build connections with one another in an immersive virtual environment. Reflecting on the empirical progress in this area of study, a comprehensive review of how VR could be used to support social interaction is required to consolidate existing practices and identify research gaps to inspire future studies. In this work, we conducted a systematic review of 94 publications in the HCI field to examine how VR is designed and evaluated for social purposes. We found that VR influences social interaction through self-representation, interpersonal interactions, and interaction environments. We summarized four positive effects of using VR for socializing, which are relaxation, engagement, intimacy, and accessibility, and showed that it could also negatively affect user social experiences by intensifying harassment experiences and amplifying privacy concerns. We introduce an evaluation framework that outlines the key aspects of social experience: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and interaction experiences. According to the results, we uncover several research gaps and propose future directions for designing and developing VR to enhance social experience.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Our literature search and inclusion phases followed the PRISMA procedure. The diagram illustrates the information flow across the four phases: identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion. It provides the numbers of identified, included, and excluded literature, along with the reasons for exclusions.
• Figure 2: Visualization of descriptive statistics of reviewed paper: (a) shows the years of publication with the number of papers (Please note that the data for 2023 only includes the first six months), (b) shows the venues of publication, (c)(d)(e) show the distribution of research contribution types, target users, and Interaction contexts in the final set of papers
• Figure 3: This image shows our classifications of VR features, complemented by example figures sourced from reviewed papers: self-representation kolesnichenko2019understandinglatoschik2017effect, interaction strategies freeman2022workingMaloney2020roth2016avatarlee2022understandingroth2019technologies, and interaction environment mcveigh2019shapingli2023we. We provide the social effect of each VR feature and summarize the social influence of three classifications.