VR Headsets In-The-Wild: Qualitative Insights on Safety, Awareness, and Social Challenges from Real Train Journeys

Virtual Reality (VR) headsets allow us to personalise how we experience reality while travelling, offering benefits over traditional devices. VR that incorporates elements of reality could be crucial to creating safe and socially acceptable VR experiences by supporting VR users to be aware of the ever-changing transit environment, and the presence and actions of bystander passengers. Our study (N=14) examines VR in-the-wild on real train journeys to explore how VR users desire to employ passthrough style ‘portals’ to reality, and what impact these portals have on their perceived safety, social acceptability, and more in a real passenger context. We utilised a qualitative methodology with user interviews to evaluate experiences after real train journeys. Our findings indicate a favourable response to VR use on public transport, particularly when travelling alone. Portals effectively mitigate safety, awareness, and social concerns, but also pose challenges in simultaneously engaging with real and virtual environments. Users show a preference for passive monitoring of real-world changes over the more demanding active checking of the portals. However, this can lead to 'information wormholes,' where changes in the real-world slip past the portals. This study provides ecological validity to adopting VR in real transit settings and offers insights for the further development of reality-awareness systems.