WHY WOMEN DON’T LIKE SOCIAL VIRTUAL : 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 designer and considers herself “very comfortable” with new technology and “very active” on . 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 like Settlers of Catan and Oregon Trail. Sometimes her brother introduces her to games on , 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.”

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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 . 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 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 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

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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 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

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two hardware setups (six respondents used the HTC Vive and seven used the 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.

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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 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

• 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.

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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.

There have been several high profile examples of harassment in social VR already and the industry has reacted by improving safety through changing the technology and making more safety features available to players. What this approach has not taken into account is that women are coming into these virtual spaces with a history of unwanted sexual attention.

Women are much more likely than men to encounter unwanted sexual attention in public spaces. A 2014 survey of 4,872 American women under the age of 40 found that 85% of women reported being harassed in a public space (e.g., catcalling, being followed, etc.) before they reached the age of 17. In response, researchers found that women tend to change their behavior in an attempt to avoid harassment. More than

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half of the repondents in the above study took one of the following actions in response to being harassed in public areas:

• Chose different routes to school / work

• Avoided specific areas of town

• Changed their clothing

• Chose not to attend a social event or departed events early

SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND SOCIAL VR

Sexual harassment and unwanted attention is the reality of most women’s lives in public settings. Social VR creates a life-like, immersive and public experience. Given this immersive nature and the overwhelmingly unequal gender dynamic with more men than women in this space, respondents talked about these spaces as seeming similar to public settings where they have been harassed. The women in our study went out of their way in social VR to avoid attracting attention, talking to or being visible to others in public VR settings. A few examples of the avoidant behavior:

• They tended to walk around at the peripheral of the public spaces to escape notice.

• Several tried to avoid all social encounters and did not speak or spoke minimally.

• Respondents who did engage in conversations with strangers intentionally signaled that they were not flirting with the men they encountered in the space:

o One participant repeatedly referred to her boyfriend as “babe” instead of his name. She told us in the post-interview that she did that intentionally “so people know that’s my boyfriend, he’s right there, don’t be hitting on me.”

o Another participant also dropped in “My boyfriend has a Samsung phone” as a way of communicating that she’s not single.

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o Several women chose non-gendered avatars such as robots. See section on self-expression for more details.

The fact that the social VR setting was largely men was immediately clear to most respondents who discussed their discomfort with being in all male environments. Consider this response from one respondent:

Participant: I was a little on guard that anyone would say something weird to me. ... But I’m usually generally that way around men.

Interviewer: Generally what way?

Participant: On guard that they’re going to say something creepy or do something creepy.

Interviewer: With any man? Or just with other men that are strangers?

Participant: I guess with strangers..? *whispers* I don’t trust them

Interviewer: You don’t trust them?

Participant: I’m sorry. Actually I’m not sorry. It’s totally based on life experience. I’m like ‘byyye, I’m good without it.’

Interviewer: So it’s based on life experience. Tell me about that.

Participant: Numerous assaults and a lifetime of harassment leaves me not super crazy about unwarranted male attention. I tend to avoid that.

Interviewer: You tend to avoid that.

Participant: Yeah. Personal thing.

During the informed consent process of our study where we told participants what to expect, researchers explained a potential risk was discomfort due to being in an online, public setting. We told them to let us know if they felt uncomfortable for any reason and said they could end the experience whenever they wanted. Some women responded to this disclosure with visible anxiety about the possibility of being harassed.

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They all agreed to continue with the study, but it was clear that several of the respondents were nervous. One respondent commented in the post VR interview about how nervous she had been.

“I’D SEEN SOME INTERACTIVE MEDIA WHERE PEOPLE HAD GONE TO VR AND SEXUALLY HARASSED OTHER PEOPLE. … THERE HAVE TO BE WAYS LIKE IF A PERSON’S HAND GETS TOO CLOSE TO YOUR BODY THEY COULD BE ERASED FROM YOUR FIELD OF VIEW OR CUT OFF... I’M CERTAIN THERE ARE WAYS TO DO THAT, BUT I WAS VERY NERVOUS ABOUT THAT. I HAVE A FEW REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCES THAT I DON’T WANT TO EXPERIENCE NECESSARILY VIRTUALLY.”

At the end of this quote, this respondent essentially asks for the bubble without knowing what to call it.

When considering the reactions of women in a public online setting, it is important to remember that VR is anonymous, public and often men outnumber women. Many women have experienced harassment in , and for these women, simply going into environments such as this produces anxiety. Women in this study clearly adapted their behavior in social VR just as they do in real life in an attempt to avoid potential harassment or verbal abuse.

Most participants avoided interacting with people except for occasions when the situation required it, such as in a game setting. Nevertheless, respondents reported several types of experiences that made them feel unsafe and uncomfortable: flirting, a lack of respect for personal boundaries, socially undesirable behaviors and noise.

“WHERE DID ALL THE LADIES GO?”

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FLIRTING

Women in the study felt singled out for attention, and they didn’t always know when the attention might be sexual. One man introduced himself multiple times to a single participant, which she found uncomfortable. Another respondent commented “I did hear one guy say, ‘Where did all the ladies go?’ which is creepy.” Yet another respondent described going to a virtual room that a man invited her where there was a dinosaur skeleton, a house and a video player where you could play music videos. She later found out that he had created the space himself.

“One of the first things he said to me was ‘hey beautiful’ and…I automatically jumped back…my body and my …but we kept talking and he was fine. He was normal. He was from England and we were just talking about VR in general. At one point I brought up my boyfriend and we kept talking and he said ‘don’t tell your boyfriend about this’ and I was like ‘Nah, I’m going to tell him all about this because this is pretty cool.’”

THE RESPONDENT SAID AFTERWARDS THAT WHEN HE SAID “HEY, BEAUTIFUL,”

“I physically recoiled. In real life, I wouldn’t have continued to talk with him.” However, she did continue to speak with him inside of AltSpace and she later said “He was fine. He was normal.” meaning that she had started to feel safe with him. Later in our interview, she said she intentionally brought up her boyfriend so that he would know she is attached. But that when he asked her not to tell her boyfriend she didn’t like that.

Other comments could be interpreted as flirting or just trying to impress respondents. One woman mentioned a comment that a man made which “shocked” her: “He said ‘I could erase everything.’ And I was like ‘what?’ And he was like ‘yeah, I’m hosting this space. I could just erase everything.’ This weird power trip he was on. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it.” The respondent wasn’t interested in his capabilities; she was more concerned about figuring out how to navigate in the world.

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Women referred back to their previous experiences with online platforms in being wary of attention and possible sexual harassment.

“I could anticipate the pitfalls that could happen, especially as a female. I used to be on ICQ back in the day. Even then you would get random notices from dudes that you didn’t know. I always felt victimized. But you could just delete them. I guess in this world you could just log off but that person might always still be there. Having somebody there with you would probably be comforting. The game system itself, having a really hard and fast no tolerance policy so players could go to them and say this user is inappropriate... “

It is worth noticing that in this quote, the respondent expects the social VR company to set rules and regulations that will make sure that the person is kicked off if they do inappropriate things.

LACK OF RESPECT FOR BOUNDARIES

Respondents struggled with unclear boundaries and challenges to physical boundaries they would expect in everyday life. On the same day, two separate participants were in AltSpace and both encountered a man who was trying to hit them over the head with a marshmallow stick. As one respondent put it:

“I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PICK STUFF UP AND OTHER PEOPLE ALREADY KNEW HOW. SOMEONE—A MAN—HIS VOICE WAS MALE—CAME UP AND KEPT SHOVING A MARSHMALLOW IN MY MOUTH AND I DIDN’T WANT HIM TO DO THAT AND HE KEPT DOING IT, AND THEN IT CRASHED. ... IT FELT VERY BRO-ISH AND ENTITLED FOR THE DUDE TO BE... I WAS TRYING TO EXPLORE AND TOLD HIM I DIDN’T... NOT TO SHOVE MARSHMALLOWS IN MY MOUTH, BUT THAT BEHAVIOR DIDN’T SURPRISE ME.”

This respondent said several times that the behavior didn’t surprise her, that she was expecting that a public, online place like this would have men who behaved like this.

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Respondents talked about how disorienting it was to not know that people were near or for their avatar to accidentally walk through someone else’s avatar. Since it felt real, it was shocking to have someone so close to their “personal” virtual space when they didn’t know they were going to be there. One respondent put it this way:

“When we were doing the disc golf thing, I had gone to get my disc and went back and turned around and there was this weird robot-looking avatar and it’s creepy. In life, you have a sense that someone else is there—smelling, hearing, sight... and you feel it too. If someone walks up behind you, you have a sense that someone is behind you. In this space, you don’t have that at all, so when someone is right behind you it is very shocking. And some of these avatars are very creepy. One looked like an alien asparagus, another one was like a dark, demonic robot. That was unnerving. I could see myself playing that game at home alone and having that happen and then being freaked out for the rest of the night.”

The disc golf set up in AltSpace VR.

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The comment that she wasn’t able to use multiple senses in this world was echoed by others in terms of not being able to be aware of what was happening or where people were. While it is certainly likely that the physical boundaries are different in a virtual space, it was difficult for our respondents to calibrate their responses based on their past experience of discomfort when someone is very close.

SOCIALLY UNDESIRABLE BEHAVIORS

Respondents also encountered people talking about, doing or drawing things they found undesirable. On two separate days, two different participants found pictures in AltSpace of penises. Each discussed it in their interviews.

“Someone had drawn a giant dick in the alt space drawing app. I was looking for landmarks to try and find [person] and I turned around and there was a giant green dick just drawn in space. And so I just said the first thing that came to me which is ‘oh, that’s a dick.’ And I think I heard someone else in the space too—not [person] —also say that. ‘Oh. There’s the dick.’ Like someone had drawn it and was looking for it, they had lost the giant dick... That space is ripe for parody, and for weird, funny shit to happen."

“I went to the ribbon drawing or whatever. There was... I think he’s a young man or boy in there... who drew a penis with semen coming out of it. And there was one other girl there, I don’t know how old she was. I was like ‘okay, I’m going to walk away now.’ And went into my own little area and drew some ribbons and you can make shapes."

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While neither respondents reacted strongly it’s remarkable that they each encountered the same kind of lewd drawing at different times in the space. They seemed to find the drawing annoying and commented that it didn’t feel particularly welcoming to see it. As one respondent said, she went to find her own area after she encountered the drawing.

Another respondent encountered a group of men in RecRoom who were talking about injecting illegal drugs while playing darts.

“THERE WAS THIS WHOLE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE NEEDLES... SOMEONE WAS ASKING FOR ADDERALL AND MAKING JOKES ABOUT NEEDING DRUGS AND ‘WHERE ARE THE DRUGS IN HERE’, JOKING ABOUT USING THE DARTS FOR NEEDLES... I DON’T THINK THEY WERE SPEAKING TO ME SO I DIDN’T RESPOND TO ANY OF THAT.”

Again, the respondent didn’t presume this had anything to do with her, but it created an environment that was unwelcoming, uncomfortable and uninteresting to her.

STRANGERS OR FRIENDS?

Socially undesirable behaviors (trash talking/drawing penises), lack of respect for personal boundaries and the potential to have flirtation from men in the virtual world made the experience uncomfortable and unwelcoming. Respondents struggled with how to “blend in” or to become engaged in the social setting without drawing attention to themselves or making themselves a target for harassment. They described discomfort, anxiety and fear.

Most respondents expressed little desire to use these platforms to meet new friends. “I don’t think I would just join like if there is a lot of people I don’t know I just join in on that because I feel like a lot of stuff online ... I just feel like usually when you have all of the in one place with no filter it’s usually bad. … [it] usually turns into like a comments section so I don’t think I would jump into that for fun.” Overall these

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interactions with strangers that didn’t feel safe lessened their interest in the experience.

All participants stated a preference to hang out in VR with people they are already friends with, or work colleagues with whom they might collaborate. Though some said that while it would be fun to hang out with their family or friends, the people they knew weren’t likely to do it. Two participants talked about the possibility of exploring social VR with their friends from university. One said “I wanted to experience this with my friends from college because I was really close to them and we all miss each other and haven’t been in the same place in a year. I want to interact with people who I’m friends with long distance.” Another talked about having an online party with her friends: “I could definitely see inviting a friend from NY and saying ‘let’s play a game with our three other friends from college’ ‘let’s get in there together and interact and have fun and we’ll all drink wine by ourselves like we’re having a party together and playing a game’”

SOCIAL NORMS

“FELT LIKE I HAD SOCIAL ANXIETY.”

Social scientists talk about social norms as “the way things are done around here”. These are the unspoken but implicit ways that people engage with one another in social settings. For instance, social norms are how a person knows to shake someone’s hand when their hand is extended or how far away to stand from another person when talking.

Respondents in our study said they had a hard time knowing and understanding the social norms in social VR. One respondent said she felt “like I had social anxiety.” Another respondent said, “If I knew more people here or the types of people here…[I’d be more outgoing]. I am the type to go up to people and start talking with them, but since I don’t know what this is all about, I’m kinda just like ‘uhhhh.’”

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A respondent talked about having other avatars play alongside her in the disc golf game. She said she had no idea how to interact with them and struggled with understanding why they were in the same space as she was.

“…the people who were randomly in the game behind me totally freaked me out. Partly because the avatars are a little scary, and partly because you have no sense of where they are. And there is really no clarity of... are you playing the same game as me? Are we in different games? Are we just in this space together with totally different goals? Are we passing by? Generally in a real space, if you walk into an art gallery and you see a stranger, you’re perfectly comfortable with that stranger because you know why they’re there; they’re there for the same reason you are. That felt less implicit in these spaces. There’s always like... ‘why are you here? Are we playing the same game? Are we playing together?’ It’s almost like the codes of interaction around that are really unclear.”

WE OBSERVED PARTICIPANTS APOLOGIZING FOR THE BEHAVIORS OF OTHERS IN THE WORLD

Several people expressed a lack of clarity in how to respond to invitations to play games or to go to new spaces in VR. Many felt like they couldn’t say no or that they were required to play games. When asked how they started playing new games in RecRoom, respondents didn’t seem to know how they had become a part of the game or what to do if they didn’t want to engage. Respondents often apologized for not knowing how to do things such as how to play a game, or how to use their controller to move. We observed participants apologizing for the behaviors of others in the world as well. For instance, in RecRoom if a teammate shot another teammate in “friendly fire”, we noticed that our participant would apologize for them.

Respondents struggled with understanding who was speaking and to whom. Two didn’t know their own headset had a microphone, nor did they know who was speaking in the VR world. No participants detected the speaking lines on avatars in RecRoom.

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RecRoom participants said that it would have been nice to know who was speaking when. Look at the curved white lines coming out of the blond avatar’s mouth. These lines indicate who is speaking, but they were too subtle for them to notice their first time in the experience.

The anxiety of not knowing the social norms reminded them of things they didn’t like about public online settings. Knowing the rules and what the expectations were for a public setting were key to making them feel comfortable. One person put it this way “I don’t want to be in a space where people think that social norms don’t exist.” She added:

"Knowing the social rules of engagement going into a space. I think that’s the same for all technology that invites everyone in. It’s probably one of the reasons I really don’t like a lot of social media. Because the social decorum, the things that make us be slightly kinder, slightly more considerate of a person, they vanish and technology and people become assholes. Technology allows some of the worst parts of ourselves to come out because of anonymity."

The information about people that participants in our study could use in everyday life was simply not available to them in the social VR setting and it was unsettling and uncomfortable. “The social cues that you would normally have about someone being creepy or safe weren’t there. It was a room full of guys and awkward.”

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CODES OF CONDUCT

None of our respondents stopped to read the prominent Code of Conduct on the wall in the RecRoom dorm room. Nor did people discover the code of conduct in the AltSpace staging area. A respondent put it this way: “I skipped over the code of conduct. I made the conscious choice not to read it and I’m not really sure why. What did it say?” While respondents said that the idea of having a code of conduct was good as it allows you to inform the community of what behaviors you want and what you don’t, it has to be read in order to be useful.

Here is the code of conduct from Rec Room. It gives general guidelines about behavior and age restrictions. There is no code of conduct in Facebook Spaces because it is a private area and you only hang out with people in that app who you are already friends with on the Facebook platform.

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This participant made a Facebook Messenger call to the researcher from Facebook Spaces. The researcher appeared to her on a tablet that she could move around in her space. And she appeared to the researcher as this avatar with her name and Facebook profile picture above her head (which we have blocked for confidentiality reasons).

WHAT TO DO?

Several women talked about not knowing what to do in the virtual space and feeling out of place. One respondent discussed not knowing what the environment was for:

On AltSpace:

“It was weird. Everybody seemed to know what they were doing and I was the only one who felt ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, I don’t know these people…They seemed really comfortable. I wasn’t really sure, other than exploring, I didn’t know how things worked. What do you do at a campfire? Usually you’re surrounded by people you know and you have a good time and you’re social. But what are people there for?”

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On AltSpace:

Interviewer: “Did you feel like there was stuff for you to do when you walked around?”

Participant: “Not really, to be honest. I got kind of bored. I had trouble picking up stuff. The maze—at first it was really cool walking into it, because you’re surrounded by jungle scenery, and then once I got in there there’s not much to do besides walk around, and after a while if you don’t get through it you get pretty bored. The house party was alright... I threw a frisbee. ... Actually the house probably would have been more interesting if you could interact with stuff. I tried opening the fridge or opening cupboards or turning the stove on, and those weren’t options. Or I tried turning on the tv and it didn’t turn on. The pool was kind of interesting because you’re standing in it. And that’s pretty much all you can do. The drawing one would be cool if there were more options.”

In RecRoom, it was easier for people to find activities to do:

“I played the darts for a little bit but I was sucking at that…I turned around and there was a for something, and I thought ‘that seems like what I want to do. I want a goal or a task to do.’ I went through these doors and there were some other people in there…We started on a quest and it felt a lot more like I knew what my next step was supposed to be, so that was more enjoyable.”

However, just providing a game was insufficient to hold one participant’s attention. As she was being interviewed about RecRoom, she critiqued it for being “cartoony and gameified” and spontaneously described the type of experiences that she wants to do in VR:

“This just made me think of something—I heard that at the New York Film Festival, they did a virtual reality tour of Auschwitz or something. I would be interested in doing history tours. I would definitely be interested in the virtual reality ‘experience a real thing.’ Go someplace you’ve never been? That seems really cool to me. Love seeing new things. So this was a little cartoony and gameified. But I’d definitely be interested in virtual reality ‘real places.’”

In Facebook Spaces, historical tours are feasible today. There is already a selection of 360 videos that users can choose from. However, while they are available, they aren’t easy to use. And one participant felt poorly after watching a surfing video in 360 and

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had a difficult time turning off the video. Overall her assessment of Facebook Spaces was:

"You can tell it's still in development and not ready for market."

Some of the challenges with being able to “do” things in the virtual world was in part due to the fact that respondents had a hard time moving and being able to interact with the world they were in (see next section for details). One participant started to watch a 360 surfing video in Facebook Spaces and then felt nauseous. She couldn’t turn off the video inside of the app and just removed her headset, ending the session.

Another participant found that the whole prospect of being in a social space to “do” things such as pick up a fake drink or go into a fake pool that in VR, where “nothing works,” was funny. “Probably a lot of that humor comes from ‘why wouldn’t you go do this in real life instead of in this sort of feels poorly conceived VR space with a grab bag of people that you’ve never met, some of whom are definitely just random kids’... the concept of that feels very absurd to me.” Perhaps the opportunity is to give people things to do that they can’t do in real life.

SUMMARY

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The AltSpace VR meditation area. You can select the type of mediation that you want (Calming, Self Love, etc).

THE WOMEN IN THIS STUDY STRUGGLED WITH THE CONTROLLERS, MENUS, LOCOMOTION.

Women don’t feel safe in public Social VR. They disliked the flirting from strangers (e.g., being greeted as “Hello, Beautiful”). Females walked along the peripheral of AltSpace and RecRoom to avoid getting attention. They felt self-conscious and asked the researchers how to find a private space. In fact, one of the most popular experiences with the participants was the AltSpace VR meditation room. Now we’ll discuss the participant’s experience with the technology, beyond the social dimension.

NAVIGATING THE VIRTUAL SPACE WAS DIFFICULT

The women in this study struggled with the controllers, menus, locomotion. I will review their experiences of each in detail below.

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CONTROLLERS TAKE TIME TO LEARN

Respondents experienced a lot of difficulty learning to navigate using VR controllers. Even though they had seen the controllers before they put on the headset, most respondents did not have a visual memory of how the controllers worked. They forgot that buttons existed, didn’t know about the trigger button and generally struggled to use the correct buttons to accomplish tasks in the virtual world. In particular, they had difficulty finding what they wanted in menus and were frustrated while trying to accomplish minor tasks such as picking up items, drawing with a brush or turning on or off menus. While all research participants did eventually complete basic tasks, most struggled with how to use the controls and to accomplish the goals they set for themselves.

Most respondents were physically motionless as they moved around the virtual space with their controllers. Very few respondents deviated from the starting physical position in the VR room other than turning or moving due to game mechanics. They did not step or move themselves from the location they had been standing. Afterwards several respondents reported being concerned that they were going to hurt themselves by bumping into the furniture. There was a safety grid was in place, but participants didn’t always know what it was.

In interviews, respondents discussed the difficulty they had in moving and navigating the virtual space and said that it strongly influenced their experience. One respondent talked about wanting more control and feeling claustrophobic when she was painting in a -like area of Alt Space and couldn’t use the controls.

“I wanted more control over what I was doing and the controls were all over the place. Like the screen popping up and the control panel and another panel popped up and then I couldn’t necessarily get them all to go away at the same time. It became way too much. I started to feel weirdly claustrophobic. I was being engulfed by my drawings.”

In post interviews and while speaking with the VR researcher, respondents tended to blame themselves and suggest that they weren’t the right user for this experience. One respondent said:

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“The current experience was frustrating. I’m not a video game player and not familiar with the natural controls, but it did not seem intuitive to me. … I think this was made with the assumption that a certain subset of people will understand and use it. I’m not that subset of person.”

Another respondent mentioned that her lack of gaming experience could have made this hard for her:

“I couldn’t figure out my own limbs and how to touch things or pick things up. Maybe they couldn’t be touched or picked up, but. And I couldn’t figure out how to paint. So I couldn’t do the things I was trying to command myself to do.”

Interviewer: So it sounds like the mechanics of it were difficult to pick up.

Participant: For me. Probably not for other people. Maybe people who like, actually play games or use consoles.”

Another respondent said regarding the navigation and use of the controllers that it was “not intuitive”. Respondents talked about controls being “obscure” and feeling “frustrated”, “struggling” or saying the experience “didn’t go very well”.

Respondents used both vs. Vive controllers and there were some differences in their use of these. Touch controllers tended to be somewhat easier because respondents understood the joystick. However, in Facebook Spaces, many did not know to point their index finger to make a selection. For both controllers, the grip buttons were counterintuitive. Respondents who had experience with Nintendo or PlayStation consoles had an easier time understanding the capabilities of the controllers.

Learning the mechanics for women was as much about safety as the basics about getting around. One woman told the interviewer:

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“In the same way that some people sit in the corner of the restaurant so they can see the door, so they can control the situation, I don’t choose often to get into situations where I can’t control the outcomes. … if it were going to be something I would use on a regular basis, I would definitely need to understand the mechanics better.”

FOR 13 OUT OF 13 WOMEN IN THE STUDY, LEARNING THE MECHANICS OF MOVING IN THE VIRTUAL SPACE WAS A BARRIER TO ENGAGEMENT.

TUTORIALS

The Social VR experiences for our respondents lacked intuitive tutorials or onboarding to enable new participants to be comfortable with controllers, menus, and build their confidence for accomplishing basic tasks. Respondents seemed reluctant to use tutorials or unaware that they existed.

Some didn’t understand that there was a tutorial and suggested that it would be good to add one.

“The UX is not very intuitive. It’s a lot of trying to figure out what to do. I imagine that if it was fully polished there would be a beginner’s guide that would guide you through how to navigate all the tools and things you can do. But I was just winging it.”

Another respondent explained why she didn’t read the hints on how to engage with the mechanics that might help her figure out how to use her controller better.

“There were probably teaching hints. I mean in the first room, wasn’t there a whole board that says, ‘Hey! Here’s what this does; here’s what that does.’ And I just didn’t even read that.

Interviewer: You didn’t read any of it?

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Participant: Yeah. Probably should have… For the total novice, is there any way to integrate making it more explicit as part of it, but have it be an option that not everyone has to go through? Because not everybody would like that. If you’re familiar with what you’re doing, you don’t need the reminder of the basics. But I feel like with that, it’s one of those ‘practice-makes- perfect,’ like riding a bike. You break it down into its component steps, but you have to do it quite a few times. You’ve got to spend some time on it before you can go off on your own.”

One respondent found the Facebook Spaces tutorial, but after clicking it she was logged out of her Facebook account. She said she regretted that she had clicked the tutorial and stopped watching it midway through. Participants saw that the RecRoom dorm room offered a tutorial, but not one respondent watched it.

SMALL TASKS REQUIRE HUGE EFFORT

Accomplishing small tasks like picking up objects, selecting a tool or a paintbrush color took respondents multiple attempts and made them frustrated. Learning how to do things that respondents saw other avatars doing was challenging. Participants that got frustrated often gave up or did not continue to seek out ways to solve these problems.

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Here the participant was trying to select the color green with her left hand and getting frustrated that it wasn’t working. In actuality, the participant had to dip the point of the pencil into the color palette to select green.

Respondents had difficulty figuring out how to draw with AltSpace’s Tilt Brush-like world, selecting the color of a marker in Facebook Spaces and struggled to add a video to a playlist for a room whose entire function was to play online videos. One participant went to the top of a ladder and watched other avatars on top of a hedge maze. She tried to get on top of it with them but couldn’t figure out how to do so.

Some of the simplest mechanics required multiple attempts to learn. When it was so difficult to accomplish minor tasks the game, the respondents seemed uninterested in continuing. From the researcher’s notes about one respondent:

Participant is playing dodgeball in RecRoom. She just kept losing over and over. She tried to ask for help. She told people she was new. She tried to leave the game but the other people asked her to stay. One time she caught a ball, but it was an accident. She was nearly immediately out every game and waited on the sidelines. Like being the

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last one chosen in a game, she seemed awkward and incapable of being a part of the game.

Similar to being unable to navigate, our respondents did not blame the app, the controllers or the game mechanics. Instead, many blamed themselves for being slow to figure it out. In the words of one participant, "Man... I’m not good at this."

When the researcher gave the respondents an excuse to leave (such as a 5-minute warning), in most instances respondents would immediately end their time in the virtual world. Saying things like, “I’m sorry, I have to go.” None of the participants were eager to continue or asked for more time.

GETTING HELP

Women often asked for help both from the researcher and people inside the game. Respondents largely needed help learning how to use the controllers better but they also asked for assistance finding out where to go and what to do. One participant discussed her conversations with a stranger in the virtual world about how to move in the disc golf game they were playing together.

“He clearly knew the controls a lot better than I did. I would be like ‘what button was I supposed to press to teleport...’ he would zip along and wait for me to get there and catch up. And mostly him being helpful. At one point I was going to overshoot the basket and he put his arms up and knocked it into the basket, which is not a thing. But I was like ‘oh, thanks for the help’ and he was like ‘yep, no problem.’ Not really chatting, just doing the game.

Interviewer: It sounds like you were helping each other out.

Participant: He was helping me. I was not helping him at all. He even came out and looked for me at some point. ‘I can’t go on if you don’t catch up!’”

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Respondents seemed to feel relief when someone helped them figure things out — not knowing how to move or what to do was stressful. One respondent explained “I tried to grab the butterflies but I couldn’t and I don’t know if I was doing something wrong or they couldn’t be grabbed. And then I went back inside and tried to paint but I couldn’t figure out how to paint but then someone else showed up and he knew how to paint and he was like trying to help me”

The conversations with others seemed at times to reinforce a sense of connection to others. Another respondent said, “I’m not super coordinated in that, but other people were very helpful. They said, ‘do this.’ That was really nice of them.” One participant with a lot of gaming experience was teaching others to use their controllers after being in VR for 10 minutes, yet she rarely spoke unless helping someone.

DON’T HIDE MENUS

It would be difficult to overstate the challenges the research participants encountered in navigating menus, particularly when menu options were hidden. In RecRoom and Facebook spaces, some menu choices are only revealed by looking at your wrists as if you had a watch on. Respondents did not know or understand that they could make selections via this mechanic nor did they do it as they explored.

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The Facebook spaces menu requires you to press the arrow (above the right middle finger here) to review additional menu choices. You can only view four menu options at a time.

The RecRoom menu was particularly difficult because it was hidden and offered multiple tabs to choose from (since the original study was run, the tabs have been removed). One participant was playing the charades mini game and reported that the people in the room were quite loud. The researcher guided her back to the dorm room, but it took multiple steps and the menu was crowded with tabs. The researcher would say things like: “Look at your left wrist as though you’re checking the time. Now select the door in the upper left.” She was dismayed by the experience and said later she wanted to end her demo and take off her headset.

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By looking at your left wrist as though you are checking the time, you pull up the RecRoom menu. The menu you see here has been updated since the original study was run in May 2017. This menu relies on icons and the previous menu used tabs.

In contrast to Facebook Spaces and RecRoom, menu discoverability in AltSpace was very high. Having the entire menu open and persistent at foot helped the participants understand there were options available to them.

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The menu in AltSpace was easy to discover because it is a constant presence and always available to the user.

All respondents expressed a dislike or a frustration in time spent navigating menus. Frustration was evident when they couldn’t find something they believed they should be able to find or when they couldn’t get the mechanics of the controllers to work. Some respondents repeatedly jabbed items in the menu even when they couldn’t select or figure out how to press or pull a trigger to make the menu work.

Very few respondents learned bubbles, muting, or blocking. When asked later about these features, they expressed interest in using them but very few respondents found these features on their own using the menus. One person who did find the function ended up muting a person around her in AltSpace. She did not seem to know what she was doing and asked the researcher before she did it. “Am I muting myself, or am I muting that person?” The current technology to help keep people safe, such as bubbles, muting, and blocking, requires technical fluency that is not accessible to first time users.

In short, navigating the physical attributes of being in a virtual space for the first time was challenging for our digital native participants. We turn now to our next research

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question about the ability of our respondents to express themselves in the virtual spaces they entered.

THEY CAN’T EXPRESS THEMSELVES

Virtual Reality allows users quite a lot of freedom to be whomever they like or to play whatever games they wish. Many of those who talk about Virtual Reality talk about it as a means of self-expression. MIT professor D. Fox Harrell of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab says that VR fascinates people because “they desire to express themselves as they can only imagine.”

Looking at the number of avatar customization options indicates that developers are devoting precious hours to creating options for self-expression. We were curious – how are users actually responding to these options? We asked participants how they felt about their ability to express themselves in the virtual worlds they visited.

What we found is that our respondents did not feel that they could express themselves in social VR either through their avatars, speaking or any other kind of relationship.

CONFINED BY SOMEONE ELSE’S IMAGINATION

“YOU’RE VERY MUCH CONFINED TO SOMEONE ELSE’S IMAGINATION.”

As part of our post-interview, we asked respondents if they felt they could express themselves in the virtual world the way that they wanted to. Every single respondent said that they didn’t feel that they could fully express themselves. For instance one respondent referred to her inability to create things or adequately change in these virtual spaces.

Interviewer: Could you express yourself the way you wanted to?

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Respondent: “Not really. It’s limiting. The little modules or apps or spaces are created by somebody else. You’re very much confined to someone else’s imagination.”

Others talked about this question in terms of the ability to respond to and talk with other humans in the space. The inability to see another person’s expressions made it difficult for one respondent to take the virtual space seriously:

“I CAN’T SEE HAVING A MEANINGFUL INTERACTION THROUGH THAT SPACE YET, BECAUSE READING A PERSON’S EXPRESSIONS AND BODY LANGUAGE—FOR ME—IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT. THERE ARE TOO MANY THINGS THAT ARE JOKE-WORTHY OR COMMENT-WORTHY OR DISCONCERTING. THOSE ARE ALL OF THE THINGS THAT KEEP PEOPLE FROM HAVING GOOD INTERACTIONS IN REAL LIFE. IF YOU’RE TRYING TO HAVE A SERIOUS INTERACTION WITH SOMEONE... WE ALREADY USE HUMOR AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM. THAT SPACE IS SO RIPE FOR HUMOR THAT I WOULD FIND IT VERY HARD TO GET PAST A DEFENSIVE PLACE WITH ANYONE, MYSELF INCLUDED. I WOULD HAVE A HARD TIME NOT MAKING JOKES CONSTANTLY IN INTERACTING THERE. THAT’S NOT TO SAY IT COULDN’T BE DONE. IF EXPRESSING YOURSELF HOW YOU WANTED TO IS HUMOROUS, FUN, THEN YES. IF IT’S SERIOUS, MEANINGFUL, THEN NO.”

Because she found the space “joke-worthy” and something to make fun of, she didn’t see herself as being able to express her more serious side within the virtual setting.

A third respondent felt unable to express herself because of her lack of ability to move and do things within the space. In response to the question “Do you feel like you could express yourself?” this respondent said:

“No. It was really hard. Someone did a waving emoji and it took me like 5 minutes to figure out how to do it. And then even when we did figure it out it was still kind of hard to do that and then there’s 5 options or something... talking helps a lot... Also, I didn’t

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know if people could see my hands or not, if that showed up on my avatar. I don’t know. It wasn’t the same as real life obviously.”

In this response, her impression of the way to express herself was clearly related to how much she was able to bodily as well as verbally communicate with others in VR. Because she struggled with the menus to find the emoji she wanted to use to respond to others, she felt limited in her ability to express her emotions.

CUSTOMIZING AVATARS WASN’T INTERESTING

This is the avatar customization area of RecRoom. Since the study was run in May 2017, RecRoom has moved the skin tone and hair color choices onto the mirror so they are more easily discoverable.

One way that self-expression is evident in VR is in the ability to create and change one’s avatar to express whatever one might wish. Yet we found that very few respondents showed much interest in changing or customizing their avatar and they struggled through the process of customizing an avatar. We observed respondents changing one

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or two features then moving to a new activity. This was true across all of the Social VR platforms that we tested.

This is an AltSpace VR menu area where you can customize your avatar and learn about your controllers.

Some simply expressed a lack of interest in changing their avatars.

• “I couldn’t really see myself so I didn’t have an interest in changing my avatar to something I was interested in because I can’t even see it. … I ended up changing it to a robot. I thought it was cool looking which is why I chose it, but I did not spend very much time thinking ‘this is what I want’...I was just ‘okay I’ll get that one.’”

• “Even when I am playing games when you get to mess around with avatars I don’t do a lot of that. I’ll put a little bit of time and effort into it, making them interesting looking, but I don’t spend a ton of time on that. I put her in a dress and gave her little buns and got rid of the facial hair and that’s all I did.”

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• “I looked through the drawers with the clothing options, and thought there was nothing interesting that appeals to me. And I really don’t care what the avatar looks like. Though, I kind of forgot that I appear to other people, so maybe I should have made a more personalized one...”

• “I chose one of the avatars that is more robot like, because it is easier and I didn’t feel like spending a lot of time working on an avatar.”

Some discussed making the avatar look more realistic or reflect their exact features.

• "Mostly I realized that the avatars don’t ever have my hairstyle. ... you want to look a little unique. It’s kind of like showing up wearing the same thing as someone else. You don’t want to show up and realize you’re in the same dress as the other girl."

• It would be interesting…to have an avatar that looks exactly like me.”

• Because that’s that ultimate, how the world reflects back to you…It’s just like getting your caricature drawn at fairgrounds. You’re curious to see the feature they are going to pick up on that becomes the defining feature of you.

A couple of respondents reacted to starting the experience with an avatar image that looked nothing like them.

“THE ONLY REAL DISCOMFORT IS WHEN YOU START OUT, YOUR AVATAR IS A BALDING WHITE MALE. AND I AM NOT A BALDING WHITE MALE.”

Experience creators can consider what are the defaults that they are building into the first time use.

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NOISE

A number of respondents commented on the amount of noise they heard while being in the virtual worlds. In particular in RecRoom, respondents physically recoiled from the noise in the headphones. One respondent said, “It was a bunch of eight-year olds screaming in my ear.” Another respondent commented that the amount of noise was something that would make them less interested in coming back:

“I don’t know that I would ever get comfortable with being in a large group of other people playing. All of that talking and extraneous noise was so distracting. I don’t know that I would ever be able to be comfortable with that. … If there were games I could play and not have to hear all of that, that would be okay. But otherwise I don’t know that I would be able to get past that part. It would be fun—the actual physical movement while playing a game, as long as you don’t have that extraneous noise.”

The ability to respond to others and to know if someone was speaking to them was another thing that respondents commented on. Either, they would struggle to understand if someone was talking to them in the world, or they wouldn’t know if someone else understood that they were talking in such a manner that everyone else could hear them:

“One thing I noticed—people were talking to talk. It seemed like some people didn’t even realize that the rest of us could hear them. Just talking like normal, not realizing they were adding to the noise level, not adding anything useful, and maybe not even talking to people in the game. Clearly those people are more adept and used to VR, and I think as more people get used to VR, more people would be more of an issue. More people having conversations with people not in VR and affecting everyone in the space with them.”

FOR THESE WOMEN, THE AMOUNT OF NOISE WAS A BARRIER FOR THEIR ENGAGEMENT.

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STAYING QUIET

Researchers noticed that women commonly stopped talking to people, and didn’t initiate conversations in public VR spaces. They seemed to not want to be noticed. Some women reflected in their interviews about the reason they were so quiet. One woman talked about how she shifted her speaking while playing RecRoom.

“I was in the dorm room playing around I was talking a lot. ‘oh that was cool’, ‘oh this is how this works’. And as soon as I got into the area everyone else was, I immediately stopped talking. I would laugh or say ‘that was cool’ a little bit, but part of it was I didn’t want to add to the din, part of it was I don’t know if I didn’t want other people in the game to realize I was talking to someone outside of the game. Or I didn’t want to be recognized as a noob... but I immediately stopped talking. Except for in the disc golf game because it was just me and another person. But when there were a ton of people there, I didn’t say anything. I was quiet and did my own thing but I didn’t interact with anyone else except the guy in the disc golf game.”

THIS RESPONDENT LATER EXPLAINED THAT WHEN SHE WATCHES HER BOYFRIEND PLAY VIDEO GAMES, SHE KNOWS HOW MUCH THEY TALK AND HOW INTENSE THE LANGUAGE CAN GET.

Another woman discussed her practice of muting her microphone while playing online video games. She explains:

Participant: If I’m in an , my standard practice is to mute anyways, because I’m not going to interact outside of the game-playing mechanisms. That helps as a baseline level.

Interviewer: You would just not talk?

Participant: In what have been more aggressive spaces. In something like this I would eventually become more comfortable and more likely to talk to people. I think my negative experiences predispose me not to want to communicate that way.”

In these quotes, both respondents have previous experiences that predispose them not to talk to others but instead to stay quiet.

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Another woman who was visiting a “house party” said she had a hard time finding people to talk to, commenting that “in real life there might be a shirt that they’re wearing or like a pin that they have on their jacket that you can start a conversation with, but I couldn’t really do that so I just didn’t really know how to start a conversation. Which usually isn’t a problem for me.” If they had been talking about topics like hiking or travel, she said she would have joined in but that she didn’t hear anyone talking about things she was interested in.

HELEN REDUX

23 year-old programmer Helen’s experiences and comments are representative of the findings in this study. The researcher noticed her struggling to accomplish tasks, and that it took several attempts to do what she had set out to do. When asked, Helen described difficulty navigating and finding people to talk to. At a virtual house she says, “This guy just came out and it was like ‘Hi’ and I was like ‘Hello’ and then he kept following me around and I was like, I don’t know what’s going on.” Helen is used to being able to talk to strangers online, but in this setting, the social dynamics were unclear. “It kind of feels like a tech conference where it’s like hella awkward guys.” She said “you don’t have any like, social cues to know… When you’re at a party you can, kind of like tell… with body language or like [who] you should go talk to.”

Helen had several experiences that she found uncomfortable. One man tried to hit her with a stick in a public area, which was when she realized that “people can interact with you semi-violently”. Another person jokingly said “Where are all the ladies?” when she walked into the public space. When she was exploring a swimming pool in the virtual world she went to the bottom of the pool with another person. Later, a third person joked “Sorry to interrupt…I’ll leave you two alone”. She described how lifelike these discomforts were: “When people got close to me I felt the same as like if someone got close to me in real life.

LIKE THERE WAS THIS ONE GUY WHO KEPT RUNNING AROUND ME IN CIRCLES AND I WAS LIKE ‘DUDE BACK OFF’”

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Helen spent very little time changing her avatar and when reflecting on it at the end she said “It was kind of nice just being a generic avatar because I kind of got the feeling from the beginning, like if I had been a blonde girl… If I was an attractive avatar it would be weird… Like unwanted attention and they would all talk to me and be annoying.” She conceded that people could tell she was a woman by her voice but at least having a robot avatar meant she wasn’t signaled out unless she spoke. She said later that she would have liked to see other female avatars to feel less alone but she liked being a robot herself.

CONCLUSION

In this pilot study, we examined the way in which female digital natives interact in social Virtual Reality. We deliberately chose respondents that we thought would be most engaged in a VR setting but who had never tried it before. We then gave respondents a lot of freedom to explore and understand the world as they felt most comfortable.

While this is a small study, the data was remarkably consistent. We found that most of our respondents felt anxious and concerned about the social dynamics they would encounter, struggled with using the controllers and navigating in the virtual space, and did not feel as though these spaces encourage them to express themselves.

Respondents struggled in a social sense, dealing with strangers and encountering behaviors that they equated to real life scenarios where they had experienced harassing behavior. In the social VR worlds they visited, they encountered flirting, a lack of respect for personal boundaries, socially undesirable behavior and in the end, most were not interested in using these platforms to meet strangers. Respondents also said they didn’t know the social norms of the places that they visited and struggled with how best to interact. They didn’t read the codes of conduct and they struggled to find things to do.

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Respondents also had trouble physically using the controllers and navigating the space. They didn’t use the tutorials and had trouble doing small tasks like picking up or putting down items, navigating menus, getting help and knowing how to move.

Finally, respondents did not feel as though these social VR settings were places where they could realistically express themselves. While some did change their avatars, they did so with disinterest. Only a few respondents were overtly talkative, most stayed silent or spoke only as much as they needed to in order to play games and interact. In RecRoom especially, they commented on the noise they experienced.

Overall, we believe we have found robust evidence that current Social VR platforms with the existing features are not appealing to females. Only one of the participants told us that she wanted to buy the VR hardware to use at home and she wanted to use it to hang out with her college friends. Also, it’s worth noting that she is an alumna of one of the top engineering schools in the United States, indicating that she and her peers from there have a higher level of technical savvy than the general population.

WHILE OTHER RESEARCH HAS SUGGESTED THAT THE PRIMARY DOWNSIDE FOR WOMEN IN VR IS MOTION SICKNESS OR PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS (SCIENCE MAGAZINE: WOMEN MORE LIKELY TO FEEL NAUSEA THAN MEN USING GAMING HEADSET), WE FOUND THAT WHILE SOME DID EXPERIENCE THESE SENSATIONS, THIS WAS NOT THE REASON WHY RESPONDENTS WERE UNINTERESTED IN RETURNING. ONLY TWO PARTICIPANTS ENDED THEIR VR EXPERIENCE EARLY DUE TO FEELING ILL.

We suspect that many more of our participants would have spent less than 30 minutes in the headset if they had been on their own. They seemed to wander in the space, and didn’t seem to derive a lot of value out of the experience. It is quite likely that several of the respondents were engaged in social desirability bias in staying in the VR world longer than they would have otherwise because they wanted to please the researchers and be perceived as good participants.

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Given all of our findings, we have distilled our recommendations across social VR platforms into the following:

RECOMMENDATIONS

SAFETY MATTERS: Privacy should be the default

The women in our study entered Social VR with a lot of trepidation and anxiety. We believe they would have felt more secure in a private staging area where they could stay as long as they liked and build confidence practicing using the controllers and other relevant skills.

DEVELOP SOCIAL NORMS: Use cultural and environmental cues to get the behavior that you want

Be creative about teaching new users what your platform is about and what you value. Recognize that as the creators of this world, you can make an environment that is welcoming for users of all backgrounds. Find ways to onboard people about your social norms without standard tutorials.

MAKE IT ENTICING: Give people things to do that fit their interests

Consider developing personas for your social VR users. This allows you to access a deeper understanding of your user base and helps you to engineer experiences around their preferences.

Look for an upcoming report on the types of experiences that females told us they would be excited to try in VR. Briefly, they are interested in storytelling, travel, and museum experiences. Being in VR for a reason like meditation class or a work meeting made a lot of sense to our users. They just didn’t see these platforms as their preferred way to hang out with people.

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ASK QUESTIONS: User test with a range of experience levels

Test your experience with different types of people to get feedback. Include people who don’t have familiarity with controllers and help them to learn what to do for basic functionality in the world.

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Part of the motivation for running this study was to apply qualitative research principles to virtual reality experiences. Qualitative research methods provide a flexible toolkit for anyone building a VR experience. The full protocol of this study is available online at www.extendedmind.io/social-vr if you’d like to understand more details about how this study was run.

Future research could also cover topics such as how men experience VR in comparison to women, or any other group of interest. It could be narrowly focused on avatar customization, or broadly focused on what types of activities do people enjoy doing the most. Our goal was to get people excited about the application of qualitative research and encourage them to use it (or hire us) in order to start testing their own experiences more rigorously.

BE A PART OF FUTURE RESEARCH

Lastly, if you (the reader) have had any negative experience in VR, please fill out the survey link here: http://tinyurl.com/yddef4h3. We are collecting people’s stories about what happened to them and what app they were using at the time.

This survey was influenced by the Hollaback project, a Cornell University research initiative to map street harassment. Our goal is to map virtual harassment and we’d like to include your story (anonymously if you prefer).

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Follow Jessica Outlaw on Twitter @theextendedmind and follow Beth Duckles at @bduckles.

Special thanks to all of our participants as well as:

Andy Baio, Kent Bye, Sarah Cargill, Jane Carr, Isacc Cohen, Isabelle D’Arcy, Clorama Dorvilias, Melissa Gregg, Laura Hall, Vi Hart, Eric Hackborn, Amy Hillman, Eva Hoerth, Adrienne Hunter, Rebecca Hyman, Laura Hudson, Justin Graham, Natalie Grant, Alison Greco, Leonard Lee, Suzanne Leibrick, Will Lewis, Taylor Libonati, Stephanie Mendoza Thor Muller, Amy Muller, Seanna Musgrave, Gabe Paez, Tony Parisi, Emily Price, Fernando Ramallo, Paul Reynolds, Krista Sanders, Jamie Sherman , Rachel Sibley, Trevor F Smith, Tyesha Snow, Katharine Sprecher, Pam Statz, Sarah Stumbo, Kerri Lynn Thorp, Kimberley Voll, Corey Warning, Bradley Weiers, Max Weisel, Timoni West

STUDY FAQ

Who were the participants?

• 13 female participants

• Ages 21 - 38

• Median age of 30

• Represented a range of industries: art, , technology, , and education

• All rated themselves as relatively or very comfortable with new technology

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• 6 females used HTC Vive and 7 used Oculus Rift with Touch controllers

Why females only?

Women have experienced sexual harassment and in some cases have reported assault experiences within social VR settings. However, there has been no systematic study of the experience of being female in VR. Our hope is that this research will be a preliminary step to valuing the lived experience of women in virtual reality.

We anticipate that this is only the start of such research and that future research can build on these findings. For instance, we would value research on a wider variety of women from different ages, socio-economic backgrounds and races.

Why such a small sample?

The purpose of this research was to gain an in-depth understanding of the way that women approach a new immersive and experiential technology. Each of the 13 respondents spent approximately 90 minutes with us from the introductory meeting to the VR experience to a post-interview. We spent intensive time with each respondent to understand their particular interests and challenges to better inform future inquiries and research on women’s experiences in VR.

This research is inductive, meaning that we did not seek to prove or disprove a hypothesis but instead to uncover themes as driven by the interests and goals of our participants. Qualitative research is well suited to analyzing an individual’s choices and lived experience. While a larger survey could have given more representative data about women as a whole, it simply would not have been able to explain what women experience inside of a social VR setting. We asked women to direct their own engagement so as to better see what they wanted to do and experience.

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It is possible to establish key themes about social VR with small samples through diligent attention and a systematic approach. Our interest was not in getting a sense of all women in Virtual Reality but rather the variety of approaches that women, in this age group, who have an interest in new technology and with minimal exposure to VR, use to explore VR. While we would always like more respondents, this is a pilot study that gathers broad evidence of each of the themes that we discovered and indicates potential future research to build upon these themes.

Yeah, but why only 13 females?

If you’d like this study to be larger, recruit a different group of people, focus on different VR platforms, or ask different questions, contact us! We are always looking for clients who are interested in hiring us to conduct more targeted research on topics like this. Alternatively, if you do research on this topic, we’d love to learn about your results. Email us at [email protected] or visit www.extendedmind.io/social-vr to learn more.

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