HCC: Small: Mitigating Online Risks: Designing Social VR to Prevent New Forms of Online Harassment

Clemson University, Clemson SC

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates new and potentially disruptive ways that people experience harassment in online social spaces, in order to design novel and safer social technologies to protect, promote trust, and mitigate emerging online risks. It focuses on newly emerging forms of online harassment in that are occurring in social Virtual Reality (VR), that is, novel and increasingly popular 3D virtual spaces, where multiple users interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays, synchronous voice conversation, avatars that track a person’s body movements, and simulated touching and grabbing features. As online social spaces evolve towards more natural and immersive interaction, social VR grows as an important and popular medium for social activities and connections in and beyond the era of the pandemic. In this way, the project directly promotes public interest in making VR research and innovation facilitate human activity. It contributes to the general public's social and emotional well-being by creating safer online social spaces and promoting healthier interaction dynamics in these spaces. This project takes a proactive approach to examining and designing new VR systems for diverse users’ novel and safe social interactions. It is working toward active prevention of new and potentially more disruptive harassment in online environments and experiences through three phases: (1) explore how people experience and cope with harassment in social VR, using automatic online data scraping, participatory observations, and interviews; (2) theorize and model new forms of online harassment using a large-scale online survey; and (3) generate user-centered design patterns and guidelines to protect users from new forms of online harassment through prototyping, a participatory design process, and community deployment. Overall, the project is expected to advance knowledge about how to explicate risks and mitigate new forms of online harassment, which emerge in response to new technologies and social experiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.