Avatar Appearance and Behavior of Potential Harassers Affect Users' Perceptions and Response Strategies in Social Virtual Reality (VR): A Mixed-Methods Study
Sexual harassment has been recognized as a significant social issue. In recent years, the emergence of harassment in social virtual reality (VR) has become an important and urgent research topic. We employed a mixed-methods approach by conducting online surveys with VR users ( N = 166) and semi-structured interviews with social VR users ( N = 18) to investigate how users perceive sexual harassment in social VR, focusing on the influence of avatar appearance. Moreover, we derived users' response strategies to sexual harassment and gained insights on platform regulation. This study contributes to the research on sexual harassment in social VR by examining the moderating effect of avatar appearance on user perception of sexual harassment and uncovering the underlying reasons behind response strategies. Moreover, it presents novel prospects and challenges in platform design and regulation domains.
Authors
- Pan Hui (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6026-1083)
- Mingming Fan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0356-4712)
- Ziyan Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2465-2954)
- Kangyou Yu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5362-3162)
- Xuetong Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9625-2012)
- Mingmin Zhang
Institutions
- Southwest University of Political Science & Law (CN)
- University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK)
- University of Hong Kong (HK)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Published
- 2024-11-07
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3686934
- Citations
- 4
- Primary Topic
- Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 1.49