Meta’s Personal Boundary feature and the importance of violence in virtual reality – Moonshot News

With the very descriptive name Personal Boundary, Metas Horizon Vice President, Vivek Sharma announced in a blog post a new feature that would protect users avatars from unwanted nearness and protect their personal space.

Personal Boundary feature prevents avatars from coming within a set distance of 1,2 meters of each other, it is activated by default and rolling out begins on February 5th everywhere inside of Horizon WorldsandHorizon Venues.

This means that avatars will not be able to invade each others personal space and if someone tries to do so, the system will halt their forward movement as they reach the boundary. Meta says that the halt will not be visible to the user as there is no haptic feedback.

In the announcement, Sharma adds that in the future, Meta will explore the possibility of adding in new controls and UI changes, like letting people customize the size of their Personal Boundary.

Note that because Personal Boundary is the default experience, youll need to extend your arms to be able to high-five or fist bump other peoples avatars in Horizon Worlds or in Horizon Venues.

There is of course no reference in the announcement, but the feature came only a few days after a 43-year-old British woman reported that she was groped in Metas Horizon Venues virtual world by a group of male avatars. The woman named Nina Jane Patel has even penned down her ordeal in a Medium post, where she has talked about being verbally and sexually harassed by three or four male avatars.

Research on both violent and non-violent games has found that players can (a) express guilt after committing violent acts, (b) report reflective and introspective emotional reactions during gameplay, and (c) debate the morality of their actions with others.

Regarding VR, studies have demonstrated that (a) witnessing physical violence in immersive spaces led participants to take the perspective of victims and better understand their emotional state and (b) controlled exposure to traumatic or violent events can be used for treatment. Broadly, studies into video games and VR demonstrate that the impact of actions in virtual worlds transfer into the physical worlds to influence (later) attitudes and behaviors. Thus, how these experiences may be potentially harnessed for social change is a compelling and open consideration, as are side-effects of such interventions on vulnerable groups.

The VR experiences differ from video gamesin that they often lack a specific goal as well as common video game mechanisms, such as points, badges, or leaderboards. Unlike video games, VR presents experiences that are meant to be lived rather than played.

VR contributes another layer of complexity in the user-media relationship by providing users with a highly interactive environment in which users become the agent of their own media experiences. Users have high agency in VR, controlling the field of view, manipulating objects, and locomoting through the mediated space at will, blurring the boundaries between content producer and consumer. Thus, virtual experiences are better able to mimic direct, firsthand experiences than traditional media. Individuals place greater weight on direct, rather than indirect, experiences when making decisions, and consequently, direct experiences tend to have stronger and longer lasting impact on attitude changes than indirect experiences.

Perhaps one of the most critical opportunities that VR provides for the primary prevention of violence is the fact that the impact of experiences in VR does not end when the user unplugs and leaves the virtual world; rather, the effects transfer into the physical world to shift the users attitudes and behaviors.

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Meta's Personal Boundary feature and the importance of violence in virtual reality - Moonshot News