A Virtual Space for All: Exploring Children's Experience in Social Virtual Reality

Social virtual reality (VR) is increasingly becoming an emerging online social ecosystem where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays in 3Dvirtual spaces. The co-existence of minors and adults in social VR presents unique challenges and opportunities regarding how these two groups interact with each other in these shared virtual social spaces, which is a timely and understudied topic in HCI and CHI PLAY. In this paper, we report our findings of a participatory observation study to explore the interaction dynamics between minors and between minors and adults in social VR. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of young people's engagement with technology and point to future directions for designing safer and more socially satisfying social VR experiences for minors.