Designing Social VR: A Collection of Design Choices Across Commercial and Research Applications
This work addresses the need for clearer design insights to inform future social VR development and improve inclusion in the design space.
The paper tackles the problem of obfuscated design trends in social VR applications by creating a taxonomy of design choices based on 44 commercial and prototypical applications, elucidating features across self, interaction, and environment areas.
Social VR has experienced tremendous growth in the commercial space recently as an emerging technology for rich interactions themed around leisure, work, and relationship building. As a result, the state of social VR application design has become rapidly obfuscated, which complicates identification of design trends and uncommon features that could inform future design, and hinders inclusion of new voices in this design space. To help address this problem, we present a taxonomy of social VR application design choices as informed by 44 commercial and prototypical applications. Our taxonomy was informed by multiple discovery strategies including literature review, search of VR-themed subreddits, and autobiographical landscape research. The taxonomy elucidates various features across three design areas: the self, interaction, and the environment.