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Building Proactive and Instant-Reactive Safety Designs to Address Harassment in Social Virtual Reality

Zhehui Liao, Hanwen Zhao, Ayush Kulkarni, Shaan Singh Chattrath, Amy X. Zhang

TL;DR

Harassment in social VR presents unique safety challenges due to embodied interactions. The authors develop Puffer, a proactive and instant-reactive safety system that integrates personal bubbles, preference badges, safety suggestions, and room filters to prevent harassment and interrupt incidents in real time. Grounded in formative interviews and iterative evaluation with 16 participants, the work demonstrates improved prosocial norms, faster protection in emergencies, and usable interfaces, while highlighting concerns about misuse and the need for user voluntary participation. The findings emphasize aligning safety features with marginalized players' strategies and ensuring flexibility and opt-in usage, offering a practical blueprint for safer social VR experiences.

Abstract

Social Virtual Reality (VR) games offer immersive socialization experiences but pose significant challenges of harassment. Common solutions, such as reporting and moderation, address harassment after it happens but fail to prevent or stop harassment in the moment. In this study, we explore and design proactive and instant-reactive safety designs to mitigate harassment in social VR. Proactive designs prevent harassment from occurring, while instant-reactive designs minimize harm during incidents. We explore three directions for design: user-initiated personal bubbles, clarifying social norms, and encouraging bystander intervention. Through an iterative process, we first conducted a formative interview study to determine design goals for making these features effective, fit user needs, and robust to manipulation. We then implemented Puffer, an integrated safety system that includes a suite of proactive and instant-reactive features, as a social VR prototype. From an evaluation using simulated scenarios with participants, we find evidence that Puffer can help protect players during emergencies, foster prosocial norms, and create more positive social interactions. We conclude by discussing how system safety features can be designed to complement existing proactive and instant-reactive strategies, particularly for people with marginalized identities.

Building Proactive and Instant-Reactive Safety Designs to Address Harassment in Social Virtual Reality

TL;DR

Harassment in social VR presents unique safety challenges due to embodied interactions. The authors develop Puffer, a proactive and instant-reactive safety system that integrates personal bubbles, preference badges, safety suggestions, and room filters to prevent harassment and interrupt incidents in real time. Grounded in formative interviews and iterative evaluation with 16 participants, the work demonstrates improved prosocial norms, faster protection in emergencies, and usable interfaces, while highlighting concerns about misuse and the need for user voluntary participation. The findings emphasize aligning safety features with marginalized players' strategies and ensuring flexibility and opt-in usage, offering a practical blueprint for safer social VR experiences.

Abstract

Social Virtual Reality (VR) games offer immersive socialization experiences but pose significant challenges of harassment. Common solutions, such as reporting and moderation, address harassment after it happens but fail to prevent or stop harassment in the moment. In this study, we explore and design proactive and instant-reactive safety designs to mitigate harassment in social VR. Proactive designs prevent harassment from occurring, while instant-reactive designs minimize harm during incidents. We explore three directions for design: user-initiated personal bubbles, clarifying social norms, and encouraging bystander intervention. Through an iterative process, we first conducted a formative interview study to determine design goals for making these features effective, fit user needs, and robust to manipulation. We then implemented Puffer, an integrated safety system that includes a suite of proactive and instant-reactive features, as a social VR prototype. From an evaluation using simulated scenarios with participants, we find evidence that Puffer can help protect players during emergencies, foster prosocial norms, and create more positive social interactions. We conclude by discussing how system safety features can be designed to complement existing proactive and instant-reactive strategies, particularly for people with marginalized identities.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 52 sections, 11 figures, 5 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Online Harassment and Strategies for Mitigating its Impact
  4. Challenges of Harassment in Social VR
  5. Proactive and Reactive Safety Strategies in Social VR
  6. Formative Study
  7. Proactive and Instant-Reactive Safety Strategies
  8. Participants and Methods
  9. Results
  10. Preventing harassment and stopping it instantly is the first priority, yet participants do not know about or cannot easily access safety features.
  11. Participants find value in making social norms more explicit and communicating their preferences to others, though they prefer methods with low overhead.
  12. Participants caution that safety features must be robust to misuse by malicious gamers.
  13. Puffer: A Proactive and Instant-Reactive Social VR Safety System
  14. User Scenario
  15. System Features
  16. ...and 37 more sections

Figures (11)

  • Figure 1: Overview of the study process and findings. We took an iterative approach to design proactive and instant-reactive safety features in Puffer and incorporated participant feedback at different stages of the study.
  • Figure 2: Puffer Overview. Proactive features, including the personal bubble, preference badges, and room preference filters, are grouped by yellow full lines; instant-reactive features, including the personal bubble and safety suggestions are grouped by green dotted lines.
  • Figure 3: Storyboard: Player JollySpartan's journey with Puffer's safety features in social VR.
  • Figure 4: Left: Personal Bubble Menu. This menu includes the ability to select a hard or soft bubble boundary. The bubble size sliders are labeled with reference to arm-length. Right: When changing the bubble size with the slider, a translucent bubble and a ruler pop up to help players gauge the distance.
  • Figure 6: Left: Preference Badge Menu. This menu includes badge management for interactions, sounds, and social energy. Right: When a player selects an interaction preference badge, the badge pops up with a translucent personal bubble to communicate their preference to others. Selecting a social energy badge causes the preference to float atop the avatar's head.
  • ...and 6 more figures