A Virtual Space for All: Exploring Children's Experience in Social Virtual Reality

Abstract

Social virtual reality (VR) is increasingly becoming an emerging online social ecosystem where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays in 3Dvirtual spaces. The co-existence of minors and adults in social VR presents unique challenges and opportunities regarding how these two groups interact with each other in these shared virtual social spaces, which is a timely and understudied topic in HCI and CHI PLAY. In this paper, we report our findings of a participatory observation study to explore the interaction dynamics between minors and between minors and adults in social VR. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of young people's engagement with technology and point to future directions for designing safer and more socially satisfying social VR experiences for minors.