Bystander interruption of VR users

Abstract

Research has begun to investigate the interruption of VR users but lacks an understanding of how social factors (setting / relationship to the VR user) might impact the interruption and why bystanders interrupt as they do. We conducted a survey (N=100) into bystander comfort when interrupting a VR user (known / unknown) in 4 settings (private spaces, public spaces, private transport, public transport) and their willingness to use a range of interruption strategies. Our results suggest relationship to the VR user is more influential than setting when considering comfort and acceptability of interruption strategy. A follow-up lab study (N=16) investigated bystander interruption of a known VR user in a private setting. Most used a combination of speech and touch to interrupt though a subset used unconventional, improvised strategies we term playful interruptions. With the recent inclusion of open ear audio in VR headsets and preference towards verbal interruptions in our results we conducted a survey (N=76) into the consumer response to open ear audio in VR headsets. We report open ear audio was used regularly by 52.6% of our respondents 60% of who rate their experience with it positively.

Safety, Power Imbalances, Ethics and Proxy Sex: Surveying In-The-Wild Interactions Between VR Users and Bystanders

“…Interrupting: was included in 21 stories with part 3 of table 3 breaking down how interruptions occurred. The preference for verbal interruptions matches results from prior work on VR userbystander interruptions conducted in the lab [10,41] although the combined use of speech and touch was theorised [41] to occur more frequently than was reported. Participants justifications for the combined use of speech and touch when interrupting matched those given by participants who used a similar combined approach in the lab [41], that is, to convey location alongside existence when interrupting, P41: "Verbal and physical communication was used to establish presence and location".…”

“…While much work has investigated VR user and bystander interactions in the lab, little has been done to explore interactions outside of it. What work has been done has primarily focused on the social acceptability of VR in public spaces [7,16,24,27] or on public transport [2,41,47,55]. Some have investigated bystander behaviour around VR users in these public spaces [16] or explored how bystanders might interrupt a passenger using VR on public transport [55] but missing from the discussion is how VR user and bystander interactions occur in more private settings such as home and workplace.…”

“…The latter surprised us as speech alone is not typically thought of as a means of surprising or scaring a VR user when interrupting. Instead, touch is viewed as the mostly likely method of eliciting this reaction [10,41].…”

Promoting Reality Awareness in Virtual Reality through Proxemics

“…However, their work limited proxemics' usage to a highly controlled environment and immersed users had no awareness of people outside the VR space. Follow-up work also enable the use of visual and audio cues [33,35,36] and multimodal notifications including visual, audio and haptic feedback [8,26] to alert VR-users of bystanders. Due to the human's visual dominance, visual and audio cues still seem to be the most efficient way to notify VR users of bystanders [8].…”

Surveying Consumer Understanding & Sentiment Of VR

“…Some feature significant augmentations of the VR user's surrounding reality into the VR scene [12,13,22] while others attempt to introduce the minimal amount of reality necessary to achieve some aim (e.g. notification of a bystander's entrance into the nearby area [28,34,35,41]). What remains unknown however is how consumers view these augmented VR experiences.…”