How to Design Social VR Spaces

A Framework for Conceptualizing and Evaluating Social VR Applications

Zach Deocadiz
Virtual Reality Pop

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This is Part 2 in a series about social virtual reality. You can read Part 1 here.

Illustration by Kevin Hong

Virtual reality is a very young field—one that hasn’t quite hit maturity yet as a medium. Its influence on a mass audience has not yet been studied in great detail. What is inevitable, however, is that once the medium matures, there will eventually be the need for some form of virtual social space. As we have seen in current social media, the choices we make when designing such platforms profoundly affect the way their users behave and interact with each other—both in the virtual world and in the physical world. This article is an exploration into the ways we can think about designing these social spaces.

A Primer on How VR is Different from Current Social Technology Paradigms

You may already have experience with creating your own online persona — most of us do it on social media or while playing multiplayer games online. We seamlessly transition between our different personas, switching our attention between social media apps on our phone and interacting with people in the physical world. The transition between the physical world and VR is a little different — this isn’t a browser, an app, or a social situation that’s easy to jump right into.

The biggest problem is the lack of critical mass: there just aren’t enough people with access to high spec computers and VR headsets. This lessens the value of the social space: you’re less likely to find people to connect with and there is a much higher barrier to inviting your friends to join.

Another problem is the current fractured VR ecosystem. With the vast number of different headsets and app stores, it’s hard for users to find their new favorite social VR apps. Even once found, it usually requires users to download the app, rather than simply tapping on a link, which increases the friction that users face before they can even try out a social app. Add in the possible compatibility errors and the lack of access on multiple devices, and you’re asking users to commit significant time and effort with no guarantee of a rich reward.

These problems act as barriers to users being able to interact with each other socially in VR. If the set-up of an app is hard, annoying, or otherwise aggravating, it may influence the way the user thinks about the product as a whole, as well as possibly negatively affecting their behavior when they finally gain access. It’s important to keep this in mind when designing a VR social experience.

1. A list of all the spectrums within the framework. 2. A graph exploration that allows us to plot existing social VR explorations. Note that being closer to the center means that the app is closer to the other side of the spectrum, as opposed to being the opposite of the axis label.

Introducing the Framework

The framework consists of a variety of different spectrums which are based on recurring design decisions that currently exist in social virtual reality apps. Each large design decision by developers influences where their app falls within the different spectrums of the framework. The spectrums are:

  • Guided to Self-Taught. Will you teach users how to use the controls? How in-depth will your onboarding be? How do you teach the user about appropriate behavior in these spaces?
  • Public to Private. Will there be large public spaces for users who are strangers to gather? Will users be constrained to only hosting private events with people they already know?
  • Prescribed to User-Generated. To what extent can users impact the way they look? To what extent can users change the way the environment looks? To what extent can users create custom interactions with other people or the space?
  • Anonymous to Identified. Do you allow users to go by a pseudonym or username, or do you require them to use their legal (or Facebook) name? Do you have a system to find out their legal information if something comes to light at a later point?
  • Reactive to Preemptive. Do users feel safe within the social space? What are the ways you can make them feel safer, both before and after an incident occurs?
  • Simple to Complex Interactions. How many different ways can users communicate? How can they interact with each other?
  • Persistent to Temporary. Are there social things for users to do even if no one else is online at the same time? Does the environment remember the last state it was in or does it reset to its original state once all users leave?
  • Shareable to Real-Time. How easy is it to create artifacts to document the space and the people within the space? How do people tell others about what they’ve been doing? Can they share the experience over a wide range of media?

This framework is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all things to consider when conceptualizing a social VR space. Rather, it is meant to be used as a tool to start critically thinking about specific design decisions and the impact they may have on the behaviors of the people in your social space.

A very unscientific and biased representation of where I believe some current apps lie on the various spectrums within the framework

Guiding the User Through the Experience

Will you teach users how to use the controls? How in-depth will your onboarding be? How do you teach the user about appropriate behavior in these spaces?

Virtual reality is a new technology, and along with learning about a new virtual space, users must learn how to use the hardware in a VR setup. Much of how interactions work in VR is informed by how to use the controllers you’re holding in your hands. The design of these controllers is influenced by video game controllers—they have buttons and triggers that are mapped to the behaviors you want to exhibit, abstracting many behaviors into a button press. For users who have no background experience in video games, it’s often hard for them to understand how to trigger these behaviors. Even for users who are used to video game controllers, because the behaviors are mapped to abstract controls, there is still a learning curve that they have to grapple with in order to remember all of the different controls. This is further exacerbated by the fact that there are no universal mappings—if you start up a new VR app, you will have to learn an entirely new set of mappings.

Alongside the struggles that users face when learning how to use the controls, there are also the struggles that come with trying to integrate yourself with a new community. Users can struggle with understanding the social norms of the social space and how they relate to existing social norms that they already hold. Unsure about interacting with others in a virtual space, users are more likely to be apprehensive when entering the space and may find certain behaviors that are possible within that space to be distasteful, upsetting, or discomforting.

With all of these problems, existing VR social spaces tend to retain a specific group of users—people who are willing to put in the time to learn how to use unfamiliar technology and people who are either socially unaware or very good at adapting to new social situations. To increase the number and diversity of users who interact with each other in social VR spaces, there are two main approaches that a designer can use:

  • Increase the adoption of VR technology, so users will be more used to how the controls work and can learn the most common behavior mappings.
  • Implement a better process to teach users the controls as well as about the tools they can access in case they find themselves in an uncomfortable situation

Right now, most social VR experiences tend towards teaching users how to interact with the space by letting the users explore. Any onboarding processes they have are geared toward learning mappings for specific behaviors, rather than helping them feel comfortable in the virtual space. When there is onboarding or a tutorial, many times it’s easy to skip or is otherwise an unnecessary step before users get access to social spaces. The result is a guided experience that doesn’t fully prepare users for actual human interaction within the social VR space.

Of course, designing an experience that prepares users for that is much easier said than done. There are a number of approaches along the spectrum from less guided to more guided. Less guided approaches that will still inform the user about social norms include:

  • Dropping them into a space where experienced users hang out for practice, such as in OrbusVR. Note that this approach can backfire if the community isn’t open and helpful to begin with. To combat this, the community needs to be primed to be helpful. In the case of OrbusVR, experienced users will have had to work with other users in order to fulfill quests that require parties of users to beat, so are therefore more predisposed to helping behavior.
  • Placing community guidelines in prominent places around the space, much like in RecRoom. It establishes a baseline of behavior that new users will expect within the space. This is, however, usually ignored or simply not seen by users.
  • Having controls related to user safety and user responses to antisocial behavior easy to find and access. Make it easy for the user to see even when not looking for it—being aware of the presence of the controls may help them feel more comfortable within the space since they know they have options. This can be taken a step further by normalizing the use of these controls within the community; when explaining how to access these controls, make it clear to the user that it’s acceptable and encouraged to use them if they feel uncomfortable.

More guided approaches include:

  • A step-by-step process that takes users through the controls and shows them how to activate any measures they need to get out of an uncomfortable situation.
  • Putting the user in a situation where they would do anti-social behavior with an AI, which would then tell them that they are doing something wrong. This means they’ll understand exactly what not to do and the measures other people have to counter any bad behavior they may exhibit. This, however, may backfire since you are pointing out clear boundaries and some people may take that as a challenge: they might learn to be disruptive without actually breaking any of the rules.

This spectrum is important to think about when considering the needs of your specific community. What kinds of users do you want to attract to your social VR app? How do you prime them to understand the social norms of your spaces and communities? How do you set your users up for success?

Further reading:
Teaching Game Mechanics Well — Guidance VS. Hand Holding
This is a Talk About Tutorials, Press A to Skip
Why Women Don’t Like Social Virtual Reality

Public vs Private Spaces

Will there be large public spaces for users who are strangers to gather? Will users be constrained to only hosting private events with people they already know?

Because VR apps lack critical mass, public spaces are a common design decision because it allows users to find others to connect with, even if they’re strangers. Even though your best friend in the physical world may not have a headset, there will always be a handful of people that may become your best friend in the virtual world. This public space is the space where spontaneity happens—new connections, new behaviors, and new communities. This spontaneity makes public spaces more exciting, but also harder to control and moderate, especially in virtual spaces where users often break social rules that they wouldn’t in real life because they feel as though there are no real ramifications to their behavior. At its worst, it turns into the realm of gut reactions, trolls, and widespread discrimination.

The public spaces you join in VR consist of open spaces where users can congregate, but lack the subtleties of real-world spaces. Often your voice feed and the voices of everyone else in the room are not mapped well by the space — walls don’t block sound as well as they do vision, acoustics, and affordances of the space don’t quite make sense, and people far away from you often sound like they’re right next to you. Even if sound is properly dampened, there’s nothing to stop users from simply upping the volume levels on their computer to eavesdrop on conversations.

This public space is balanced with the idea of having a private space. This is a space where you can always choose the people who you are talking to at any given point in time. Private space is where closer connections happen—the space where you can talk about things without being paranoid about someone listening in. Private space is also a place of reflection—the space where you won’t be required to quickly react to everything in order to convey your presence. It is, however, a space that is disconnected. Without external public spaces connected to it, you are restricted to only talking to the people you know. It’s often easier to reinforce existing social hierarchies within the private space since users are less likely to be confronted with others with different or unfamiliar behaviors.

The private rooms you join in VR are heavily constrained to remaining within that private space. Conversations you have there are not easily ported out or recorded unless you decide at the beginning to publish it, and it’s practically impossible to obtain a record of a conversation that occurred in the past without recording it. There’s also often no way to change the status of the room to be public after the fact — you must quit out of the private space and join a separate public space with the same people.

The balancing act between public spaces and private spaces is interesting in the digital world, where they tend to be very distinct and binary. The app usually has a clear distinction of which rooms are public or private, and you often select between these two discrete options when creating a room. There are attempts at making this binary less jarring by limiting the number of people that can enter a public space in order to try to make it more personal and intimate, such as having a small party in RecRoom quests, but this doesn’t address wider problems of distinguishing between public and private spaces.

This is very different from the flexible nature of spaces in the physical world where something may be both private and public in nature. For example, a coffee shop may be a very public space, but individual tables and booths offer some semblance of privacy within that public space. Similarly, you can be in a club with someone but lean closer together to create your own private space in order to hear each other speak. The inverse relationship is also true: you can turn a private space into a public space simply by shouting or by sharing a recording online where others can comment on it.

When a developer makes the decision to support certain kinds of spaces in their app, it informs how users will want to interact with others using the app. Public spaces, like those in RecRoom, draw users who want to have spontaneity with strangers, while private spaces, like those in Facebook Spaces, draw users who want to connect with people they already know. When the developer doesn’t make the decision, such as in VRChat, they will often leave it up to the user to decide on what kind of space they want to be in. This, however, only delays that binary decision rather than eliminating it.

There are pros and cons to either extreme of this spectrum, and for some applications, it makes sense to only cater to one. However, there is plenty to still explore when it comes to creating spaces that blur the boundaries between what is considered public and private.

Further reading on public and private spaces:
Making Publics, Making Places by Mary Griffiths and Kim Barbour
Publics and Counterpublics
Harry Styles and the Uninhibited Joy of Being a Fan

Comprehensiveness of the Design Ecosystem

To what extent can users impact the way they look? To what extent can users change the way the environment looks? To what extent can users create custom interactions with other people or the space?

How much should aesthetics, interactions, and connections be regulated by the program? Do you allow your users to upload any avatars, interactions, or environments they want? Or do you specify what kinds of avatars, interactions, or environments are acceptable? These choices are a balance between giving users the freedom to express themselves and regulating interactions to make sure everyone feels safe and welcome.

Facebook Spaces, Altspace, RecRoom — all of these applications highly regulate the design of the environments, avatars, and experiences that users can find themselves in. Usually created or deeply vetted by an internal team, these applications have the ability to make sure users cannot use their custom avatar or environment to easily harass or abuse others. This means that everything you see or are given the ability to do is always subject to the community guidelines. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t the potential for abuse — users think of novel interactions all the time — but the potential is significantly decreased since the variables are much less random. This consistency also makes the environment more welcoming to new users. If your avatar matches the aesthetics of the other users and the environment, it feels less incongruous to take up space in that world.

On the other hand, experiences like VRChat offer users the option to upload pretty much anything that the system can read — custom avatars, environments, and interactions. This results in avatars in all shapes and sizes, from copyrighted creatures like Pokémon to various anime-inspired characters. It gives users not just a representation of themselves, but a way to express their personalities, interests, and subcultures. These avatars, however, can also do things like shoot particles out of their arms, have large accessories, and make sound effects — all of which can be very disruptive to the people around them.

This spectrum represents the decision between giving the user absolute freedom of expression and ensuring that users cannot abuse their freedoms in order to harass other users. A more balanced approach would be to allow tweaks to the visual design system within reason: give the users the power to tweak the small things they care about, while still allowing for structure and rules. A moderation system, a curated store of accessories, and a system for customizing avatars that felt natural would all fall under this.

Further reading:
Why Women Don’t Like Social Virtual Reality
The Tyranny of Embodiment
Body and Mind: A Study of Avatar Personalization in Three Virtual Worlds

Level of Anonymity

Do you allow users to go by a pseudonym or username, or do you require them to use their legal (or Facebook) name? Do you have a system to find out their legal information if something comes to light at a later point?

One extreme on this spectrum would be to remove anonymity as much as possible, since being anonymous is often conflated with trolling or other disruptive behavior. Tying people to their real names and existing social media profiles means that it’s easier to hold people accountable for what they say or do; they are much less likely to act out or misbehave if they know their parents, employers, or other interested parties could be contacted about it. Furthermore, having real names associated with accounts, as opposed to usernames or pseudonyms, just makes more sense in certain contexts. In Facebook Spaces, where you’re limited to just talking to people you already know, it may be more awkward to have a username as opposed to just using the name your friends already know you by.

However, in order to restrict anonymity, there must be some definition of what constitutes someone’s “real identity”, which can cause issues for certain groups of people. For instance, when Facebook required users to use their legal name, many transgender people struggled to stay on the platform — they weren’t trying to be anonymous, but were treated as such because of existing social hierarchies. Similarly, users now are sometimes known more by their social media handles than their actual legal names, something that could be likened to a nickname in terms of importance. At what point does it make more sense to go by a nickname, a pseudonym, or any other name compared to using your legal name? How do you define what that boundary is?

It is also important to consider the benefits of anonymity. The internet is a place for self-exploration for many people and anonymity plays a big part in that. Why would you explore your gender, sexuality, feelings, or opinions in a chat room, when all it takes is one person remembering your name to out you in an entirely different context where you’re less comfortable talking about it? Users often want to know who other people are, but would also prefer that they themselves remain somewhat anonymous. Anonymity allows users to feel protected. If users are forced to use their actual names, harassment could travel from the virtual world into the real world.

One extreme on this spectrum allows users to remain completely anonymous, making it harder for the community to hold people accountable for being bad actors, but the other extreme makes it more likely that existing social hierarchies make their way into the virtual world.

While it’s often thought of in terms of these extremes, anonymity does not have to be a binary system. For example, do you tie user accounts to their real names but allow them to pick public-facing usernames? Do you have an identity verification system? Do you track their IP addresses or other details in order to keep track of them? Do you have systems in place that allow users to safely share their actual data with people that they meet in VR and trust? Wherever you fall on this spectrum, your choices will attract some groups of users and make others feel uncomfortable.

Further reading:
Why Women Don’t Like Social Virtual Reality
XR Privacy
Social desirability, anonymity, and Internet-based questionnaires
Online Teaching: Encouraging Collaboration through Anonymity

Finding and Reacting to Instances of Antisocial Behavior

Do users feel safe within the social space? What are the ways you can make them feel safer, both before and after an incident occurs?

The one thing that will be a constant in all social spaces is that there will eventually be bad actors and people who aim to disrupt the space. This can be addressed in a few ways on a spectrum from proactivity to reactivity.

To be proactive in this situation is to restrict people’s actions so they cannot act badly — they are not even given the choice. This works well with things that you can control easily, like having a more defined design ecosystem so users can only select certain choices for how to look, or having a personal space bubble around each user so people don’t see others that get too close to them. Having proactive design means situations are resolved before they even happen, which in turn means that the user never has to be put in an awkward or humiliating situation. This approach is, however, more likely to fail when the data is more ambiguous, such as in bad automatic monitoring on social media posts or filtered messages in Club Penguin. It is also very hard or impossible to be proactive about certain things since VR is a medium that relies on very immediate and impulsive voice input and visuals that result in more ambiguous data to parse in real time.

On the other end of the spectrum is being reactive. To be reactive is to respond to people acting badly. This approach relies on things like moderators or user reports in order to punish bad actors after the fact. It also includes actions like the user being able to block other users. Reactive design decisions are often easier to implement compared to the proactive design decisions, but can also often result in incidents taking longer to resolve or being ignored.

This spectrum is a special case: you can and should employ design decisions from both ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between. VR has many new possibilities for interaction, resulting in new social interactions, but that also means it also has fewer ways to keep people accountable for bad behavior. While not every option available to you may be appropriate, each design decision doesn’t stop another one from happening concurrently. When figuring out which options to implement, it is also important to consider the perspective of the people who are most affected — those who are from a marginalized social group, or those who may not be in good mental health.

Further reading:
Why Women Don’t Like Social Virtual Reality
Keeping Virtual Reality Environments Harassment-Free
Making Ethical Decisions for the Immersive Web
Americans Favor Protecting Information Freedoms Over Government Steps to Restrict False News Online

Ways of Communicating

How many different ways can users communicate? How can they interact with each other?

By and large, you can condense all the ways of communicating in social VR programs into the following list:

  • Speech/voice
  • Drawing, usually in the air
  • Gestures, usually limited to the head and hands
  • Canned and specific interactions (e.g. throwing balls, shooting guns, pressing buttons to make your avatar emote)
  • Limited areas where you can share media (e.g. pre-defined screens displayed in the space)

These are all the low-hanging fruit in terms of communication — they’re made up of data that’s easy to transmit, such as audio, imprecise drawings, tracked body parts, and mapped inputs. However, there are many more ways humans communicate:

  • Facial expressions
  • Touch
  • Eye contact
  • Writing
  • Sharing media, such as videos and images

There’s plenty of research currently going on to do with facial expressions, touch, and eye contact. These are all broad topics that, once the technology has progressed far enough, will easily be integrated into social VR experiences of the future. Implementation of them into VR experiences is stalled more by the limits of technology, as opposed to the limits of software or design.

However, the latter two methods of communication — writing and sharing media — are integral to how we communicate in today’s world. People are so enmeshed in media now that we’ve moved so far from just using our voices and movements to communicate. Sharing media has exploded in popularity through the use of social media — we share memes, gifs, and reactions as second nature now. The media you use can speak to your personality or identify you as part of certain subgroups, such as fandoms. These subgroups, and the ability to find people that you can relate to, are what truly forms communities on the internet—and even outside of virtual spaces. Because smartphones have made it cheap to take and edit photos and videos, people show each other media in everyday face-to-face conversations. You can quickly search up a picture from your last holiday or a funny video you saw on your timeline and share it with a friend.

There are some existing equivalent options in some of the social VR apps described above — Facebook Spaces lets you bring in photos from Facebook to display in the space, while certain worlds in VRChat allow you to search for a video to display up for everyone to see. Other more media-oriented social spaces, such as Bigscreen, Oculus Home, and Anyland, use screen sharing as a workaround. However, these options don’t come anywhere near as close to the fluency with which we share things on social media, nor do they take advantage of new media types that are specific to VR. It’s not easy to make a meme or find a specific gif to share. Even more traditional media, such as writing, is hard to access — just try to share your fanfiction in a VR social space.

Much of this comes down to two things: current tools and technology have not made sharing files an easy thing to implement, and there hasn’t been an implementation of this that has been a good user experience. Simple things like trying to find a file on your computer to upload into VR are very hard tasks to do in headset. It’s much easier for developers to require users to pre-plan their media use, like requiring users to place files in a specific folder or requiring users to upload a file to their servers, than it is to build out systems to access your entire computer’s file system. Similarly, there is still often a disconnect between accessing an image in a web view by searching the internet for it and then translating that into an image that you can place in VR space.

This spectrum represents the possibilities of VR as an interactive medium. While we are very far along in terms of thinking about certain interactions, technical limitations and a lack of consistent design patterns result in experiences that don’t explore the full range of possibilities that VR may have in the future.

Further reading:
HoloLens 2 AR Headset: On Stage Live Demonstration
Shared Experiences in Mixed Reality
Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World
Making Ethical Decisions for the Immersive Web
Virtual Reality and Accessibility References
Stop Drawing Dead Fish
Gesture Based Interaction

Persistence of Media

Are there social things for users to do even if no one else is online at the same time? Does the environment remember the last state it was in or does it reset to its original state once all users leave?

Existing social apps struggle with allowing users to quickly create and place content that will remain persistent in the world for future users to see and interact with. Once the last person leaves the room, that instance of the room usually disappears — you can no longer see the remnants of what’s left. Objects are tidied back into their places, images and videos are disconnected, and everything is reverted back to their default state. Things are easier for VR social spaces to manage if the space is purely based on face-to-face contact, since it’s much less interaction to police, but it limits the amount of interaction people can have in the space.

This is in stark contrast to the internet where people are used to asynchronous interaction. What happens on the internet stays on the internet, unless you choose to delete it (or not), and things remain in that state for others to interact with. It means that you don’t have to be online to interact fully with other users. Instead, the content becomes the method of communication. This content is used to create social connections, even across large distances and time zones, by allowing people to find their in-group without having to repeat themselves over and over again once they meet someone new — your identity is spelled out by the content that you share.

This results in differences in both the behaviors that users feel comfortable exhibiting and the content they end up generating. The internet is a public area but everyone has their own private interaction with it: they can lurk, passively consume, etc. without people knowing, and they can do it all in their own time. People have to actively choose to interact and take part in a conversation on the web. This is in contrast to VR where it’s very obvious when you are in a public space — it’s much harder to hide away or passively watch when you have a physical presence in the space as an avatar. There are many more social rules to play by, no chance to explore the community on your own terms before committing to engaging, and no way of easing yourself in — things that might scare users away from engaging with the community.

It also introduces other problems. How do you create engagement when people are outside of set meeting times? How do you encourage users to share more of themselves and invest more of their time in a community, when there may not be any record of that community ever existing?

While some aspects of forcing users to be online at the same time to communicate may be alluring —leaving no trace of your presence after you leave allows you to be forgotten more easily, for example — it also limits the richness of what people can be excited about in the space. If there’s no storage of data, how do people share their creations? You end up being limited to who and what’s already in the environment, as opposed to being able to reach a larger audience and community. If we think about what people are most excited about in online spaces, it’s mainly to do with finding communities with similar interests. There are no current VR spaces that allow you to showcase your slash fanfiction, display your fanart, or screen your fan videos, at least not in a way that remains persistent for others to consume without having you build an entire environment to house it.

Further reading:
Room Persistence Discussion for Mozilla Hubs
How the Tech Sector Could Move in One Direction

Sharing

How easy is it to create artifacts to document the space and the people within the space? How do people tell others about what they’ve been doing? Can they share the experience over a wide range of media?

You can take a selfie within VR or a screen capture of what you’re doing in current social spaces. These are all media transformations that bring VR into screens, to engage a much larger audience that doesn’t have VR headsets yet — a big goal for most VR companies, since relying on a purely VR audience usually results in a low user count and low engagement. However, this doesn’t quite treat the VR experience as a new medium — it relies on incomplete translations of the experience in order to make it relatable to a wider audience. It also doesn’t translate back into the VR space, despite being natively captured in it. The best you could do is throw up that image or video capture into the space to rewatch it, but that’s simply bringing 2D media to display in a 3D world — something you can already do with a lot more ease outside of the virtual world.

So what about sharing virtual spaces and experiences in a way that feels natural in that medium? With Oculus Home, you can now bring your 3D creations from Oculus Medium and other programs into your social space. This, however, is still a far cry from being able to share experiences, special moments, or interesting interactions—the things that have made existing social networks popular. Much like how the computer and the internet democratized the sharing of videos and photos, VR has the potential to democratize the sharing of experiences. Instagram culture influenced the creation of popup museums because the experience of one — something location specific and special — was something special you could capture in a photo and something not anyone could share. VR could enable the experience itself to be shared — what impact would that have on existing social networks and what ways could VR social apps enable that sharing process?

Of course, there are many design and engineering questions surrounding that (How much of the scene do you capture? How do you display it? Are we constantly recording, so we have a record of everything that happens in case the user wants it?), but it’s something that could really set VR apart from other mediums. What if you could see peoples’ interactions in full 3D at a later point in time? Much like how actors pilot puppets in Mindshow, you could see people pilot their own avatars and live the same experience again at a later point. There is also the possibility of crossing the boundaries between the virtual world and the physical world. With better augmented reality technology, it may be possible to view VR captures in the context of the physical world—just export it, share it, and view it on an AR device.

This spectrum has not been fully explored yet—things edge towards the extreme of only having real-time experiences. With VR being an immersive medium, having anything less than an immersive shareable asset is just a translation of existing media rather than embracing what makes VR different from other mediums.

Further reading:
How the Tech Sector Could Move in One Direction
Social Media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media

A very unscientific and biased representation of where I believe some current apps lie on the various spectrums within the framework

Possible Futures for Social VR

The various spectrums I’ve outlined above all have room for exploration within them, each with positives and negatives. It is also important to note that each of them also influences the others. For example, some methods of communication rely on the user’s ability to create persistent media within the space.

One path forward is to explore where existing apps fall within the framework—seeing their commonalities, their differences, and the areas where all of them currently fall short. Recombine different parts of different apps, invent new ways of pushing what is currently possible, and understand which choices draw which types of people.

While these spectrums cover a great deal of what makes VR social spaces social, it is also by no means an exhaustive list. Whether in VR or in the real world, there are plenty of considerations that you have to take into account every time you make a decision when designing a social space. Much like the spectrums themselves have room for exploration, through the exploration of virtual social spaces there may be more spectrums to add in the future.

Thank you for reading! In the next article, I’ll be exploring the role that avatars play in how people behave within VR social spaces.

Thanks to everyone who read through this beast and gave me feedback—Clint, Chris, Norah. Thank you to Liv, who tweets a lot of research that ends up informing my views. Thank you to Chris for teaching Computer Utopias — by far my favorite class I took in college and the class that influenced me the most in what I make. Thanks to Paul, for teaching me about publishing and publics. Thanks to Michele Ford for editing and Kevin Hong for the illustrations.

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