Promoting Reality Awareness in Virtual Reality through Proxemics

Abstract

Head-Mounted Virtual reality (VR) systems provide full-immersive experiences to users and completely isolate them from the outside world, placing them in unsafe situations. Existing research proposed different alert-based solutions to address this. Our work builds on these studies on notification systems for VR environments from a different perspective. We focus on: (i) exploring alert systems to notify VR users about non-immersed bystanders' in socially related, non-critical interaction contexts; (ii) understanding how best to provide awareness of non-immersed bystanders while maintaining presence and immersion within the Virtual Environment(VE). To this end, we developed single and combined alert cues -leveraging proxemics, perception channels, and push/pull approaches and evaluated those via two user studies. Our findings indicate a strong preference towards maintaining immersion and combining audio and visual cues, push and pull notification techniques that evolve dynamically based on proximity.

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

“…Since McGill et al's seminal paper, much work has investigated a range of approaches for increasing a VR user's awareness of bystanders. Research has investigated the feasibility of text notifications [40,45], audio notifications [40], haptic notifications [14], avatar designs [36,48,54], continuous vs one-off discrete notifications [36,40], creating implicit auditory awareness [40], and contextually increasing the amounts of reality shown within the VR scene [13].…”

“…Bystanders might also simply observe the VR user's activity without the VR user's knowledge they are copresent (a story type not likely captured by our survey due to the one-sided nature of the interaction). While systems to increase a VR user's awareness of bystanders can assist with the latter [14,34,36,40] these systems typically do not inform the VR user of the bystander's actions. Future work can consider exploring systems to notify the VR user in response to a specific bystander action then, e.g.…”

“…They might even record the collision in an attempt to create a viral video [6]. Again this highlights the necessity of research into systems which increase a VR user's awareness of their surroundings, and the presence and activities of others (be they strangers or known to the user) [14,34,36,40]. While some of these potentially abusive scenarios may have been mitigated against by the availability of such systems, we suggest those outside VR also need to be educated to understand what is and is not appropriate with respect to consensual VR user interactions, with the current lack of established social norms perhaps enabling encounters that are of high risk to both VR users and bystanders.…”

“…VR is often used in shared, social settings, but interactions between VR users and bystanders (those physically near the VR user but who cannot directly interact with the VR user's virtual environment) in uncontrolled social settings are not well understood. Recent work has investigated a range of systems to increase a VR user's awareness of nearby bystanders [14,34,36,40,54] and to facilitate interactions with them [18,19,25,33,35,57]. However, surprisingly little is known about VR usage within the real world settings where these systems might be used.…”

ModularHMD: A Reconfigurable Mobile Head-Mounted Display Enabling Ad-hoc Peripheral Interactions with the Real World

“…A common solution is overlaying captured real-world objects and people on VE, which includes the Augmented Virtuality (AV) approach [7,28,31,33,46,55,78], displaying real-world people or objects as previously prepared 3D models [6,16,20,21,37,40,47,48,65,68,69], and their combinations [78]. Although these visual cues significantly increase the situational awareness of HMD users, they do not help bystanders estimate the status of HMD users or facilitate collaborative interactions.…”