Designing Virtual Environments for Social Interaction

Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019

Commercial social VR applications represent a diverse and evolving ecology with competing models of what it means to be social in VR. Drawing from expert interviews, this paper examines how the creators of different social VR applications think about how their platforms frame, support, shape, or constrain social interaction. The study covers a range of applications including: Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, Altspace VR, AnyLand, and Facebook Spaces. We contextualize design choices underlying these applications, with particular attention paid to the ways that industry experts perceive, and seek to shape, the relationship between user experiences and design choices. We underscore considerations related to: (1) aesthetics of place (2) embodied affordances, (3) social mechanics, (4) and tactics for shaping social norms and mitigating harassment. Drawing on this analysis, we discuss the stakes of these choices, suggest future research directions, and propose an emerging design framework for shaping pro-social behavior in VR. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI design and evaluation methods; Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools

Workshop on Personalised and Social Navigation in …, 1998

Virtual environments introduce a new type of space that people inhabit. Two virtual worlds, Active Worlds and Onlive Traveler were observed to investigate how social norms involved with personal and group space, privacy, crowding and territoriality affect people during ...

2003

Members of a community may not know each other in real life. The design of CVE in which members are known and there is interaction in a real space is different to the traditional design of CVE. It should consider the real location of each resource, appropriated awareness and communication strategies, and the human-human and human-resource relations. Our University Department was selected as an example organizational unit for experimentation. We start with the real physical environment and we design a CVE to provide new collaboration features to people working in the unit and those who will visit it. The advantages of the approach are many. First, people are familiar with the basic physical environment. Second, some activities requiring physical presence can be done with virtual presence, enabling more convenient ways to work for employees. Third, new opportunities for collaborative work appear as it is easy to do them with the proposed CVE. Finally, the approach is extensible, since new features can be added. In this paper we present the approach and the design of the proposed CVE.

Futures, 2001

This paper examines the interrelation between the geographical and social aspects of virtual worlds. We examine the main geographical features of Activeworlds, a multi-user virtual environment available over the Internet. Activeworlds is not only one of the most popular virtual environments, it is also the only publicly accessible one in which users can build themselves, and thus shape their geographical and social environment. We examine, among other features, transportation, mobility, and property appropriation in this virtual worlds system. Further, we describe some of the influences, both from urban planning and science fiction, on the geography of Activeworlds. We also examine the social relations that arise from these geographical conditions, including the 'rough and ready' mentality of this 'cyberspace frontier'. Finally, we consider the implications of this virtual worlds system for theories of the emerging geographical and social relations in virtual environments. 

This research looks into a specific range of issues that a functional public everyday augmented space brings forth. It particularly deals with: (a) a design proposal for an augmented bus-stop, (b) a studio-simulation created in order to test certain aspects of the designed intervention, and the critical analysis of the issues emerging out of both stages of this design-research, as well as their theoretical implications.

ece.ubc.ca

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are gaining visibility in the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). The purpose of a CVE is to provide affordances in order to reproduce conditions that augment interpersonal interaction in a physical ...

Springer eBooks, 2001

2014

Social Navigation of Information Space, 1999

Collaborative Virtual Environments, such as multi-user domains MUDs, chatrooms, or three-dimensional graphical environments, provide a common space for people to interact in, independent of geographical location. In this chapter, we examined how the different metaphors used to represent two-dimensional and three-dimensional environments might influence interpersonal behaviours. We focused on behaviours related to navigation and positioning: 1) proxemics, the maintenance of personal space, 2) the signaling of private space, and 3) the effects of crowding. We discovered that the design of the three-dimensional space offer sociopetal spaces that encourage interaction, make clusters of actors easily visible, and provide cues so that people maintain a sense of personal space. In both environments, adverse reactions to crowding occurred. We suggest that differences in interpersonal behaviours may be influenced by an embodiment (avatar), design features of the space, and the number of other actors present. In a three-dimensional environment, these factors appear to influence navigation and positioning in the environment.