WHY WOMEN DON’T LIKE SOCIAL VIRTUAL REALITY: A STUDY OF SAFETY, USABILITY, AND SELF-EXPRESSION IN SOCIAL VR BY JESSICA OUTLAW, M.S. AND BETH DUCKLES, PH.D. INTRODUCTION Helen* is a 23 year-old who enjoys meeting new people online. She works as a professional software designer and considers herself “very comfortable” with new technology and “very active” on social media. She uses multiple social media platforms daily and says she “like[s] to be able to connect to different people in the tech industry.” Twitter in particular has been a good place for her to network. She successfully got a job and was asked to give a talk at a conference because of her Twitter followers. Helen likes to get together with family and friends to play card and board games like Settlers of Catan and Oregon Trail. Sometimes her brother introduces her to games on Steam, though she says she loses interest pretty quickly and doesn’t spend a lot of time playing them. While she has watched people in VR headsets playing games at conferences, she had never tried it out herself. She expected the experience to be more lifelike than it looks when you’re just watching someone else use the head mounted display (HMD). “I DON’T THINK I WOULD DO [VR] JUST FOR FUN.” Helen seems like the perfect person to try out social VR. She’s tech savvy, is into social media and said she enjoys meeting strangers online. She has experience with online games and likes to try out new technology. Yet when Helen finished her introductory experience in social VR, she said “I don’t think I would do [VR] just for fun.” WHY IS A TECH SAVVY MILLENIAL LIKE HELEN NOT INTERESTED IN SOCIAL VR? www.extenDeDminD.io For social VR, an outgoing, technology savvy 23-year old software engineer would be a potential easy convert. Yet when the researcher gave her the 5-minute time warning that the experience was about to finish, she immediately took the headset off and said she was done. Why is a tech savvy millenial like Helen not interested in social VR? In this paper we inductively look at what the experience is like for female users such as Helen who are comfortable with technology but who have not yet spent much time in Virtual Reality. As we will describe, in this study we gave participants a small introduction and then let them explore a social VR platform however they wanted. We were interested in how these women were able to get around in the virtual space, how they navigated social dynamics and how they expressed themselves. Our goal was to let them describe what appealed to them, what interested them and similarly what challenges and discomforts they experienced. We listened to what they said worked for them and what didn’t. STUDY OVERVIEW The goal of this study was to introduce Millennial and Gen Z women who are comfortable with technology to a social Virtual Reality (VR) experience and see what they experienced. We wanted to understand how young females who grew up using technology and are digitally savvy would respond to being in social settings inside of VR. News reports and tech media have published a number of reports on harassment and abuse in public social VR platforms, however there has been little to no systematic research on the experience of being female in current social VR platforms. QuiVR got attention in October 2016 when a woman named Jordan Belamire was harassed in their game and wrote a post on Medium about her experience called My First Virtual Reality Groping. The Guardian, Quartz, and other publications covered Belamire’s story, likely making it one of the first news stories that the general public hearD about Social VR. The founders of the game responded with a technical solution of a personal bubble. This is a good start, but it is insufficient because it still requires technical competency to use. None of the existing commentary on sexual harassment in www.extenDeDminD.io/social-vr 2 www.extenDeDminD.io VR addresses what it is about the culture of social VR that makes verbal and sexual assault possible. We developed this research project with female users like Jordan Belamire in mind. We are trained as researchers with advanced degrees in behavioral science and sociology. Drawing on the academic traditions of ethnography, observational research and open interviewing, our research methodology involves inductive reasoning. In other words, we worked from the assumption that if we brought women into the VR environment, they would best lead us in understanding what they liked, didn’t like and what they wanted to do. Our role was to introduce the technology, observe, and listen to them. “SOCIAL VR PLATFORMS WERE GENERALLY UNWELCOMING” In the largest study of its type ever conducted, the women in our study told us that public social VR platforms were generally unwelcoming and unfriendly to them, especially for those who didn’t come to the VR study with prior experience with video game controllers. RESEARCH METHODS In this pilot project, we aimed to offer an in-depth engagement with 13 women. We recruited from social networks and email networks asking for women who were interested in trying out VR. Those who responded answered an online form on their experience with technology and gaming. We selected females between the ages of 21 and 38. They rated themselves comfortable with new technology and had no prior experience with Social VR platforms and very little experience with VR in general. All interviews were conducted in the office of a social VR company in Portland, OR. First, participants were walked through an informed consent form and asked an introductory set of questions about their relationship with new technology, gaming and social media as well as their expectations about VR. Next, we offered a VR experience with one of www.extenDeDminD.io/social-vr 3 www.extenDeDminD.io two hardware setups (six respondents used the HTC Vive and seven used the Oculus Rift). Example of the VR room set up. The researchers observed what the participant saw on the monitor behind her anD then listeneD to what she said to others who she encountered online. There is a built-in microphone in the heaD-mounteD Display. We told respondents to imagine that they had this hardware at home and to explore the social worlds as they would if they were on their own. A researcher was with the respondent observing and answering questions as needed, though we told them we would not tell them where to go or what to do. During the VR demo, the researcher was able to see a display of what the participants were seeing on the PC monitor and could record what the participants were looking at or saying. After an approximately 30-minute session in social VR, the respondent debriefed with a different researcher explaining what they did, whom they talked to and what they thought about the experience. Our goal was to first listen to the stories that they told us, then to ask more in-depth questions about how this experience influenced their thoughts about VR. www.extenDeDminD.io/social-vr 4 www.extenDeDminD.io In order to give a variety of experiences to our participant sample, we randomly assigned them to visit AltSpace VR, Facebook Spaces or RecRoom (with some visiting more than one location if there was time). We alternated between using the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift for variety in hardware. WE LOOKED FOR PARTICIPANTS WHO WERE INTERESTED IN TRYING OUT NEW TECHNOLOGY This is a pilot study with a small sample of women. However, we deliberately chose women who were technologically savvy and digital natives to understand the experience of those who are most likely to be excited by the VR experience. We looked for participants who were interested in trying out new technology and had interest in games and gaming. By looking to those who are most likely to find this new technology interesting and engaging, we gather data on those women for whom VR would be seen as an intuitive marketing fit. We first wanted to understand how women in our study approach the question of navigating and learning the technology in order to move around and feel confident in the social VR space. In this section, we look specifically at: • how the respondents learned how to use the controllers • how they did basic actions and tasks in the virtual world • how they asked for help • their experiences with VR menus The VR room researcher gave each respondent the opportunity to spend time holding and practicing touching the buttons before they put on the headset and said she would be there to help but wouldn’t help unless they asked. The researcher then observed and took notes as respondents explored the virtual spaces. www.extenDeDminD.io/social-vr 5 www.extenDeDminD.io FINDINGS This report shares primary takeaways from the entire qualitative study and will go into depth on each of them. First, we discuss the barriers to social interactions, then we delve into the technical difficulties, and finally we address the challenges women had expressing themselves. THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL HIGH PROFILE EXAMPLES OF HARASSMENT IN SOCIAL VR SOCIAL DYNAMICS WERE CHALLENGING One point we wanted to understand was how women navigated the social environment of social VR and dealt with being in an immersive online, public space. We began to understand quickly in this environment that women’s experiences being harassed in the “real” world are hard for them to detach from their reactions to the social VR worlds they visited.