Intelligent Machines The War on the Disturbingly Real Trolls in Virtual Reality
When you feel like you really are inside a virtual body, protecting your personal space is important.
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Experiences like that were one reason that Kelly and coworkers at AltSpaceVR formed an all-female team last year to design a feature called the “personal space bubble.” It causes other people’s avatars to disappear and become inaudible if they get closer than about an arm’s length of your own virtual body, and makes you invisible and inaudible to them. The bubble is active by default, but you can turn it off if you do want to get closer to someone (Kelly says that air kissing is an important greeting between friends in AltSpace).
AltSpace also lets you mute specific avatars to prevent you from hearing each other, or to block them, making you and them mutually invisible.
[Philip Rosedale] and Kelly both say that VR trolls are in the vast minority, and argue that they will become less of a problem as more people become used to the technology and the culture of virtual-reality spaces becomes more established.
Raph Koster, a high-profile video-game designer whose hits include the multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies, thinks VR trolling is in fact likely to get worse. ... He says companies will have to start more actively curating, investigating, and punishing bad user behavior, for example by hiring dedicated staff. ...when more people start visiting a virtual space, trolling becomes more of a problem because they feel more anonymous.
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603746/the-war-on-the-disturbingly-real-trolls-in-virtual-reality/