WHO IS THIS SPACE FOR?
EVERY PLACE COMMUNICATES WHO IT SERVES
After one person demo’ed social VR, her impression was:
“I felt like everyone was really weird, to be honest with you. I’m not a video game person. I also think anime is creepy. It’s not my thing. You were in this weird zombie city with these weird characters. And I was like ‘WHO IS DOING THIS? I guess I’m doing this…’
As you can read in the introduction and narrative sections about this study, my nine participants are a particularly obsessive group of people because they have devoted years of their life to experience design, thinking about minutiae of things like where people will wait in this space, where will they sit, for how long, what type of chairs, how many chairs, how much light will be on the chairs, etc. because they know it can make or break their success. One person reported that she trains her wait staff on non-verbal communication in order to minimize disrupting her diners.
That attention to detail characterized all of my participants. And after they all demo’ed social VR, their impression was that social VR was not built to serve them or their desires. What I learned from how they interacted with these platforms is that there is no such thing as a silent space. Every place signals to people what is is for, who is is for, and more. So, why did these social VR platforms perform poorly at signaling a welcoming, engaging intent upon arrival?
First, let’s start with the people dimension. Many of my participants are highly social people. Three of them own restaurants (with 11, 20, and 35 years of experience in hospitality, respectively). On a weekly basis, they might interact with hundreds of strangers at their work. And on nights when they are not working, they go out to other restaurants and bars to experience new places and see how the competitive landscape is evolving.
As social as these folks can be in a bar or among strangers in their daily lives, it was hard for them to be social in the VR platforms. They were unsure who was a real person and who was an AI. They were unclear on what the purpose of the virtual place was or the goals the people there. At least one participant saw the potential for stimulating social interactions with strangers:
It would be nice to be at home, and still be able to come here and flirt.
But the nightclub that she visited was empty so that theory went untested. As easy as it is for these folks to be social in a bar, they did not act in extraverted ways when they were in VR.
When people come to my restaurant, I know why they are there and I know how to serve them.
Of the nine participants in my study, only one person spent a large chunk of their demo time chatting with various people in the platform he visited. That person is someone who described himself as a long-time gamer. It does concern me that the three hospitality professionals had a difficult time with the social dynamics and the gamer initiated conversations immediately.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
More research is needed to verify this among a larger sample of participants, but when I asked “Who is this space for?” across multiple worlds and multiple platforms, people told me:
“Right now, this is built for my ex-roommate’s boyfriend who sat on our couch and played Call of Duty for 8 hours a day and talked to people around the world.
Or,
The people who are not social. The people who are hanging out at home, making avatars and talking to people that way because they don’t want to meet people in real life.”
I personally know a much wider range of people who use social VR than just some generic label of unsocial beings. How to connect the dots between who I know is actually in VR and what their stereotypes of participants were? It comes down to the 3D art and navigating via the controllers generates comparisons to video games. I asked most participants who they felt these social VR platforms are built to serve, and they offered many ideas:
“I felt like I didn’t belong there. For people who are familiar with gaming… I don’t video games at all. Maybe for someone who does, that is where they feel comfortable.”
In some instances, they were able to be very specific about who in their life would enjoy spending time in these worlds:
“My older sister is a software engineer, into roleplaying stuff. She hates shopping, she hates clothes. She’s the only person I could think of who would do shopping in here.”[On shopping in VR.]
Or,
“My teenager would like this because she plays MineCraft. But it’s not for me”
It will be interesting to observe how this characterization changes if enterprise or education applications of VR become massively popular. Perhaps business or training uses will begin to change people’s perceptions away from gaming.
As I see it, the current destinations did not appeal to an audience that was mostly new to VR. People did not feel like they belonged nor that these open, free spaces were built for them. If you are building a neutral plaza or meeting space in VR, bring in new people periodically and test your design choices with them.
In the next section, I’ll share the participants’ beliefs on how space shapes behavior.
