Context is Comforting
Setting context and providing purpose is essential to someone feeling welcome… and safe.
Social Virtual Reality platforms are working to generate engaging experiences that draw people in and motivate them to return. It led me to wonder — what are the core elements what make humans feeling comfortable and stimulated and turns them into repeat visitors? To answer that question, I gave demos of social VR platforms to nine experts of spatial & social experience design and then asked them for their impressions. Read the study’s introduction here. You can also read part 2 on Owning the Narrative, part 3 on Who is this Space for? and part 4 Place Creates the Rules of Behavior.
Rarely in the real world do you enter a place without knowing why you’re there. That just doesn’t happen very often. And the times it does happen you’re drunk or kidnapped.
In giving many social VR demos over the past year, I’ve heard similar feedback from many people and it’s about being unsure of what to do in the space and not knowing why the other people in the space are there. In this section, I’m going to discuss how the context, or lack thereof, affected the spatial experts in this study. And then in the next chapter, I’ll dive into one particular solution to this that many of them requested.
Overall, the exploration of multiple digital worlds online in a short period of time was a new experience for the participants:
It takes a while to understand the purpose of the space you’re in. It’s different if you’re intentionally going to a space.
And most of the spaces that these spatial experts create (offices, retail stores, restaurants) are destinations. Or, if they are found in a process of exploration, it is in the context of their surroundings (office parks, malls, other restaurants, etc). To be transported to the new worlds and not have a transition place was difficult for some of the participants.
This could be part of the way that I ran the study. I’d set people up with a headset inside of a social VR platform and let them choose whatever intrigued them. Typically, they made their choice based on a thumbnail image and a title of the world only. By letting them choose on their own, I was trying to let me mimic a natural exploration process rather than directing them for the most part. Nightclubs were the only environments I made sure every participant visited. Clubbing is a whole separate chapter in this research.
People don’t feel welcome when they don’t know what to do in a space.
The consequence of leaving people to explore on their own and not being clear about its purpose or affordances is a frustrating user experience.
[One world in particular] felt the least welcoming, the least engaging. I walked in and had no idea what to do. No instruction, no idea how to use my controllers to make anything happen — I just had no idea. No information, no context.
The Safety Component: Why are people here?
And then when users looked around and were unsure of what the purpose of the space was, that frustration turned into another negative emotion directed at the other people in the same space — suspicion.
Objectives of other people is still not clear to me. The intentions of people who were there was not clear. The people on the dance floor weren’t really dancing, so I don’t know why they were standing on the dance floor. The guy over by the bar isn’t drinking, why is he at the bar? I don’t know why anyone is there. Not knowing someone’s intention… you’re like “who the fuck are you?”
That escalated quickly from not knowing what to do all the way to feeling apprehensive about other people’s trustworthiness.
To resolve this tension, many participants asked for a host to guide them to the worlds that they were exploring. They saw hosts as part of the solution for for setting context and welcoming users into any space. In the next section, I will give an overview of the ideal hosting experience inside of social VR.
To see when the next part on hosting in social VR comes out, follow me on Twitter: @theextendedmind
