The future of VR systems may be uncertain, but as consumer-grade devices come down in price, we’re probably going to see a lot of apps that go beyond gaming. Companies are betting that VR (and, one day, AR) will become the new interface for what we’re already doing on Web and mobile: shopping, working, and socializing. Imagine Twitter in VR: thousands of trolls and idiots, screaming into your face forever. Sounds like the apocalypse, right? Maybe. Developers are already thinking about how to prevent abuse from ruining their VR spaces. But first, they have to grapple with the changing face of trolling in VR.
People troll each other online for a million reasons, but one of the most obvious is that it’s simply much easier to say cruel things to someone who isn’t physically in front of you. Countless psychological studies have shown that people in real life have a difficult time saying negative things to each other’s faces. And this could actually be good news in the fight against online abuse in VR. Once VR social spaces are good enough to create decent facsimiles of our faces, engaging in mass mobbing or trolling may become harder. There’s a huge difference between sending a nasty tweet and speaking the same words to somebody’s face.
The question is, will our psychological blocks against insulting people to their faces actually kick in when we’re in a virtual space? Preliminary evidence from early social VR spaces suggests the answer is complicated.
The VR creepers
Rec Room is a half-game, half-social space for Vive and Oculus Touch, and it already has problems with harassment. A man trying to play charades captured video of a now-notorious player called Handibot groping him. Players are divided on whether this is scary or funny. Meanwhile, less ambiguous forms of harassment have cropped up: in the Steam forums for Rec Room, a player reports being sexually harassed three times. They want to know how to block other players.
Meanwhile, Jordan Belamire’s account of being sexually harassed in the game QuiVr made headlines late last year. Belamire had just gotten the hang of using the Vive to play the shoot-zombies-with-arrows game, when a guy decided to turn her into his prey: “Even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest. Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.” Admittedly, the avatars in these games look like cartoons. We still have a long way to go before talking to another person in VR feels the same as talking to a person IRL.
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Source: Thescene