How Harassment Shapes Self-Perception and Well-Being in Social VR: Evidence from a Controlled Lab Study.

Social virtual reality (SVR) allows real individuals to communicate and engage in simulated physical environments and activities. These systems simultaneously afford social and physical presence. However, the precise nature of various presence states in SVR is unclear. This study addresses this conceptual gap through interviews with SVR users and interpretative phenomenological analysis of the individual responses. This research shows that physical and social presence are only occasionally co-experienced; presence in SVR often depends on the individual experiences/backgrounds, perceived affordances, or specific goal of technology use. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of presence and its dynamic nature in SVR shaped by the users’ individual experiences. This facilitates how we will study and measure presence in SVR in the future.

The growing interest in the self-similarity effect of avatars in virtual reality (VR) has spurred the creation of realistic avatars that closely mirror their users. However, despite extensive research on the self-similarity effect in single-user VR environments, our understanding of its impact in social VR settings remains underdeveloped. This shortfall exists despite the unique socio-psychological phenomena arising from the illusion of embodiment that could potentially alter these effects. To fill this gap, this paper provides an in-depth empirical investigation of how avatars' self-similarity influences social VR experiences. Our research uncovers several notable findings: 1) A high level of avatar self-similarity boosts users' sense of embodiment and social presence but has minimal effects on the overall presence and even slightly hinders immersion. These results are driven by increased self-awareness. 2) Among various factors that contribute to the self-similarity of avatars, voice stands out as a significant influencer of social VR experiences, surpassing other representational factors. 3) The impact of avatar self-similarity shows negligible differences between male and female users. Based on these findings, we discuss the pros and cons of incorporating self-similarity into social VR avatars. Our study serves as a foundation for further research in this field.

This paper explores how social virtual reality, a novel 3D virtual social interaction space that provides embodied and immersive experiences, can be leveraged to maintain existing close interpersonal relationships over distance. Based on 672 Reddit posts and comments, our findings show that in addition to initiating and building new relationships with online strangers, social VR platforms’ unique features, including physicality, the enhanced sense of presence, and the broad range of shared embodied activities, can also help maintain various types of established close ties (e.g., parent-child, friends, siblings, and romantic partners) over distance in a nuanced way. This work contributes to understanding the increasingly important role of social VR in innovating modern computer-mediated relationships and can inform the future design of social VR to better support people’s social needs and interpersonal connections.

User traits mosaic: Understanding the multifaceted landscape of social VR users

Harassment in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) is a growing concern. The current SVR landscape features inconsistent access to non-standardised safety features, with minimal empirical evidence on their real-world effectiveness, usage and impact. We examine the use and effectiveness of safety tools across 12 popular SVR platforms by surveying 100 users about their experiences of different types of harassment and their use of features like muting, blocking, personal spaces and safety gestures. While harassment remained common-including hate speech, virtual stalking, and physical harassment-many find safety features insufficient or inconsistently applied. Reactive tools like muting and blocking are widely used, largely driven by users' familiarity from other platforms. Safety tools are also used to proactively curate individual virtual experiences, protecting users from harassment, but inadvertently leading to fragmented social spaces. We advocate for standardising proactive, rather than reactive, anti-harassment tools across platforms, and present insights into future safety feature development.

Social Virtual Reality (SVR) offers new forms of social interaction, identity expression, and embodied experiences, but it has also revealed significant issues related to social inequalities and unequal power dynamics within virtual worlds. Employing a critical, intersectional approach, we investigate how existing power dynamics and inequalities shape individual experiences and interactions in SVR, shedding light on the differences between the ways that dominant groups and marginalized groups (in relation to race and gender specifically) experience SVR. Analyzing qualitative survey data, we discuss the complex relationship between power dynamics and key SVR affordances, including expectations around perceived anonymity, limited options for avatar customization, practices for self-representation, and actions relating to embodied social interactions. Identifying the specific ways that power and privilege are reenacted in virtual environments, our work calls for deeper engagements with the ways that non-dominant identities and experiences continue to be marginalized in SVR.

Social Virtual Reality (VR), where people meet in virtual spaces via 3D avatars, is used by children and adults alike. Children experience new forms of harassment in social VR where it is often inaccessible to parental oversight. To date, there is limited understanding of how parents and non-parent adults within the child social VR ecosystem perceive the appropriateness of social VR for different age groups and the measures in place to safeguard children. We present results of a mixed-methods questionnaire (N=149 adults, including 79 parents) focusing on encounters with children in social VR and perspectives towards children's use of social VR. We draw novel insights on the frequency of social VR use by children under 13 and current use of, and future aspirations for, child protection interventions. Compared to non-parent adults, parents familiar with social VR propose lower minimum ages and are more likely to allow social VR without supervision. Adult users experience immaturity from children in social VR, while children face abuse, encounter age-inappropriate behaviours and self-disclose to adults. We present directions to enhance the safety of social VR through pre-planned controls, real-time oversight, post-event insight and the need for evidence-based guidelines to support parents and platforms around age-appropriate interventions.

Social Virtual Reality (social VR or SVR) provides digital spaces for diverse human activities, social interactions, and embodied face-to-face encounters. While our digital bodies in SVR can in general be of almost any conceivable appearance, individualized or even personalized avatars bearing users’ likeness recently became an interesting research topic. Such digital bodies show a great potential to enhance the authenticity of social VR citizens and increase the trustworthiness of interpersonal interaction. However, using such digital bodies might expose users to privacy and identity issues such as identity theft: For instance, how do we know whether the avatars we encounter in the virtual world are who they claim to be? Safeguarding users’ identities and privacy, and preventing harm from identity infringement, are crucial to the future of social VR. This article provides a systematic review on the protection of users’ identity and privacy in social VR, with a specific focus on digital bodies. Based on 814 sources, we identified and analyzed 49 papers that either: 1) discuss or raise concerns about the addressed issues, 2) provide technologies and potential solutions for protecting digital bodies, or 3) examine the relationship between the digital bodies and users of social VR citizens. We notice a severe lack of research and attention on the addressed topic and identify several research gaps that need to be filled. While some legal and ethical concerns about the potential identity issues of the digital bodies have been raised, and despite some progress in specific areas such as user authentication has been made, little research has proposed practical solutions. Finally, we suggest potential future research directions for digital body protection and include relevant research that might provide insights. We hope this work could provide a good overview of the existing discussion, potential solutions, and future directions for researchers with similar concerns. We also wish to draw attention to identity and privacy issues in social VR and call for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Social virtual reality (social VR) platforms gained popularity among users over the last few years. They provide users with a sense of social presence, potentially stimulating social interaction in distance education. Insights on how VR enhances the social aspects of learning are scarce, however, and past examinations often focused on the effects of short usage times of self-developed VR learning applications. To analyze the potential of a simple-to-apply off-the-shelf social VR environment in distance education, in this qualitative study, a sample of 35 master's students employed the AltspaceVR platform for university seminars and group work over a six-week while campus access was restricted due to the covid-19 pandemic, and 23 of them were interviewed to examine their perception of the technology. The results show that social VR facilitated feelings of social presence, a more natural and spontaneous way of communicating with peers and teachers, and an increased sense of community in the classroom, compared to the alternative of videoconferencing. Participants reported high acceptance of the technology for teaching and learning tasks, particularly for interactive activities (e.g., workgroups) in small groups, but also identified limitations related to aspects such as image resolution, lack of note-taking tools, or the feeling of dizziness and fatigue after prolonged use. These results highlight the potential advantages of social VR for stimulating the social dimensions of online education, as well as the remaining challenges that need to be addressed to enable its use in higher education.

As social virtual reality (social VR) platforms increasingly captivate users worldwide, questions arise about how digitally mediated self-representation affects psychological health. This study investigates how avatar characteristics—specifically perceived avatar appearance similarity and perceived attractiveness—shape users’ well-being in social VR, with a focus on the mediating role of avatar identification. Drawing on two-wave longitudinal data collected over a three-month period from 486 VRChat users, the findings reveal that perceived avatar attractiveness was positively associated with users’ satisfaction with virtual life through enhanced avatar identification. However, perceived similarity did not exert a significant positive influence. Notably, while identification with attractive avatars supported virtual well-being, avatar attractiveness was also negatively associated with self-acceptance, suggesting a complex relationship between virtual self-presentation and mental health outcomes. These results highlight the critical psychological processes through which virtual identity communication is associated with users’ well-being and self-perception. This study calls for greater attention within health communication research to the ways avatar-mediated interactions in emerging digital environments can both support and challenge mental health.

The growing adoption of social virtual reality (VR) platforms underscores the importance of safeguarding personal VR space to maintain user privacy and security. Teleportation, a prevalent instantaneous locomotion method in VR, facilitates user engagement but can also inadvertently intrude upon personal VR space, thereby raising privacy concerns. This paper introduces three innovative negotiated teleportation techniques designed to secure user-to-user teleportation and protect personal space privacy, all under a unified small-group development framework. We have designed and evaluated three types of negotiated teleportation techniques: Sector technique for directional control, Distance technique for minimum social distance control, and Area technique for defining circular permissible teleportation areas. These techniques foster a collaborative approach to selecting teleportation points that respect personal space. To evaluate the efficacy of these techniques, we conducted a user study with 20 participants who performed social tasks within a virtual campus environment. The findings demonstrate that our techniques significantly enhance privacy protection and alleviate anxiety associated with unwanted proximity in social VR.

As social Virtual Reality (VR) grows in prevalence, new possibilities for embodied and immersive social interaction emerge, including varied forms of interpersonal harm. Yet, challenges remain regarding defining, identifying, and mitigating said harm in social VR. In this paper, we take an alternative approach to understanding and designing solutions for interpersonal harm in social VR through the lens of consent, which circumvents the lack of consensus and social norms on what should be defined as harm in social VR and reflects the embodied, immersive, and offline-world-like nature of harm in social VR. Through interviews with 39 social VR users, we offer one of the first empirical explorations on how social VR users understand consent as "boundaries," (re)purpose existing social VR features for practicing consent as "boundary setting," and envision the design of future consent mechanics in social VR to balance protection and interaction expectations to mitigate interpersonal harm as "boundary violations" in social VR. This work makes significant contributions to CSCW and HCI research by (1) uncovering how social VR users craft novel conceptualizations of consent as boundaries and harm as unwanted boundary violations, and (2) providing three foundational principles for designing future consent mechanics in social VR informed by actual social VR users.

Evidence of virtual reality's (VR) efficacy in hospital settings coupled with the rise of inexpensive consumer devices have led to the development of social virtual reality (SVR) applications being incorporated in hospital settings. SVR provides opportunities for social interactions in virtual environments, allowing individuals to virtually socialize, regardless of geographic or mobility constraints. However, the full range of potential applications and the challenges of deploying SVR in hospital settings remain unexplored. We conducted a scoping review to characterize SVR applications studied in hospital settings to better understand SVR use for inpatient populations overall and in preparation for a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project investigating SVR use with a specific clinical population. In this scoping review, we searched MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, IEEE, and ACM Digital Library. After screening 2334 studies and reviewing 146 full texts, we identified 12 studies as eligible for analysis. Eleven of the 12 were published in the past 7 years, with none older than 12 years. As this is an emerging field, many publications were case or pilot studies, with small sample sizes ranging from 3 to 200 participants, and with mean participant ages that ranged from 9 to 75 years. Patient populations included those with stroke, cancer, COVID, as well as other health conditions. Discussion of privacy and accessibility concerns was limited, as was the reported influence of SVR on measures associated with inpatient medical treatment (such as, adherence to clinical treatment while in the hospital while in a SVR intervention), which we highlight as critical issues for SVR's clinical use. We discuss our findings in the context of potential future directions for research in this area.

In this study, we investigated whether intercultural communication can be learned as effectively through desktop-based social virtual reality (social VR) as it can through online study, and if social VR improves the motivation to gain cultural intelligence in distance learning. Two groups of international students attended a seminar called “Intercultural Communication”—one online via social VR rooms and videoconferencing, and one via videoconferencing only. The students then completed an online questionnaire and qualitative interviews regarding their experiences of learning intercultural encounters and development of intercultural communication skills through social VR. Based on our findings, social VR is an engaging complement to online study for learning intercultural communication competence. However, students claimed that it could not replace online or face-to-face study, and the quality of students’ experiences depended on their technical equipment. The rapid development of virtual teaching methods, virtual reality hardware, and international Internet connectivity offers the hope that learning intercultural communication via social VR will become easier in the future.

Social Virtual Reality (Social VR) has evolved from a theoretical concept to a sophisticated communication medium over the past two decades. This systematic literature review synthesizes 78 peer-reviewed studies published between 2004-2024 to examine the development of Social VR as an interpersonal communication platform. The research employs a PRISMA-guided methodology to investigate five key research questions covering avatar-mediated communication, non-verbal cues, collaborative applications, ethical challenges, and inclusivity aspects. The findings reveal that Social VR has transcended its initial perception as an isolating technology to become a rich, multimodal communication medium that supports embodied presence and immersive interactions. Avatar-mediated communication demonstrates the Proteus Effect, where digital representation influences user behavior and self-perception. Non-verbal cues including gestures, spatial proximity, and gaze direction significantly enhance co-presence and emotional expression beyond traditional video conferencing. Collaborative applications in scientific research, education, and professional settings show improved engagement and knowledge retention through 3D immersive environments. However, significant challenges persist including limited facial expression tracking, inadequate real-time moderation systems, and ethical concerns regarding virtual harassment and privacy. The review identifies accessibility barriers related to device costs, digital literacy, and geographic disparities in research representation. Despite these challenges, Social VR demonstrates remarkable inclusive potential, particularly benefiting elderly users, neurodiverse individuals, and non-verbal communicators who adapt gesture-based and emoji-mediated interactions. The thematic synthesis reveals five primary domains shaping Social VR development: avatar communication, non-verbal interaction, virtual collaboration, ethical considerations, and inclusivity. Future research directions emphasize the need for longitudinal studies on team trust, cross-cultural trials in diverse contexts, AI-enhanced moderation systems, and standardization of expressive avatar technologies. The study concludes that Social VR holds transformative potential for reimagining human connections in digital spaces, contingent upon responsible development practices that prioritize safety, accessibility, and ethical design principles.