How VR Designers Manage Collisions: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis of Strategies, Trade-offs, and Design Rationales

Abstract Virtual Reality (VR) experiences require designers to balance immersion, safety, comfort, and spatial coherence. Within this context, collision management represents a critical challenge, as users interact simultaneously with virtual environments and physical spaces. Although the literature has extensively investigated technical solutions for collision prevention, locomotion, and boundary visualization, less attention has been given to how designers conceptualize and address collision-related problems during the design process. This study investigates how VR designers and developers perceive, communicate, and manage collisions in immersive environments, considering both virtual and real-world contexts. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with VR professionals and analyzed the resulting corpus using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. The findings reveal that collision management is a multidimensional design problem involving safety, perceptual coherence, interaction credibility, and implementation feasibility. Participants reported a broad repertoire of strategies, including spatial and physical constraints, perceptual cues, navigation-control mechanisms, communicational approaches, and multimodal feedback. The analysis also identified situations in which designers deliberately deprioritize collision management, treating collisions as a non-central concern due to contextual factors such as controlled environments, seated experiences, or technical limitations. Based on the literature synthesis and empirical findings, the study introduces a conceptual taxonomy of collision events in VR, distinguishing collisions occurring in virtual and real-world environments and the entities involved in each case. The results contribute an empirically grounded understanding of how practitioners reason about collision-related design decisions and provide implications for the development of tools and frameworks that support collision communication and multimodal affordances in immersive environments.