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Social-VR

Former HTC CEO Unveils 5G-enabled VR Headset & Social VR Platform

At a special event in Taipei, Taiwan, HTC cofounder and former CEO Peter Chou today revealed the first products from the new startup XRSPACE. It’s serving up both its own 5G-enabled standalone VR headset as well as a new social VR platform which appears to compete with Facebook Horizon.

Chou sees XRSpace serving the upcoming era of widespread 5G; much like how smartphones first arrived on the back of the 2.5G network in the early 2000s, the former HTC CEO sees the company’s headset, Mova, and its social VR platform, Manova, taking human interaction “to a new level” and offering more connectivity on a person-to-person level. And XRSpace is planning to bring it to the mass market.

XRSPACE Mova

Mova is a standalone VR headset that does away with motion controllers, instead offering optical hand tracking which users will use to navigate UI and interact with others online. Like Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go, the headset only includes a single remote, which appears to have a touchpad and button array for basic input.

XRSpace is taking an interesting route with its hand-centric design philosophy, as the company is looking to appeal more to a wider set of users who aren’t necessarily gamepad savvy. Along with optical hand tracking comes room-scale tracking, making Mova closer to Oculus Quest or Pico Neo 2 in function.

“We want people just to use their hands for main navigation,” Chou says. “We think everybody knows how to use their hands; there’s no learning barrier. Your hands are always with you—you don’t have to carry them. And hands are free.”

Its optical sensors are also capable of room scanning, the company says, making a photorealistic version of your play space by uploading textures and depth data to the cloud for processing.

Hardware specs are still not entirely clear, however Mova is said to offer 5G, LTE and Wi-Fi connectivity built on the back of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset. The company claims a 20% reduction in weight over Oculus Quest, a larger battery, greater DPI display (no resolution just yet) clocked at a 90Hz refresh rate.

The company will first offer a developer kit; there’s no word on pricing yet, although XRSpace says it will reveal more closer to its launch in June. A consumer version of Mova is said to arrive sometime in Q3 2020. You can signal your interest on the company’s website starting today.

Mova Specs

CPU – Snapdragon 845
RAM – 6GB
Connectivity – 5G, LTE, WiFi
Weight – 470g
Battery – 4600 mAh
DPI – 702dpi
Refresh rate – 90Hz

XRSPACE Manova

XRSpace is imagining plenty of interactions to take advantage of Mova’s hand tracking in its “mass market” social VR platform Manova, notably highlighting handshaking, high-fiving, and manipulating objects such as throwing darts and playing basketball.

Manova is looking to offer many of the social VR mainstays too, including a personal cinema and meeting rooms for remote work, however it also promises a busy city center, night clubs, and multiplayer mini-games. It will also offer premium 2D and 360 video content from its operators and partners.

The social VR platform is said to integrate an avatar creator which lets you make a full-body avatar from a single selfie, something XRSpace Head of Design Chris Lin says will look “just like you.” Avatars, Lin says, include high-quality skin textures, a facial expressions system, and an AI-driven contextual awareness system so your avatar will more realistically react to other users around it. The headset is also said to offer full body tracking, but how that’s possible with front-facing optical sensors, the company has yet to say.

Image courtesy XRSPACE

At this point, Manova feels more like a conceptual wishlist than a functioning social VR platform as such. Many of the activities seen in the announcement video are questionable in their practicality, or even arguably useless in a virtual context. That said, XRSpace has partnered with the likes of Qualcomm, Deutsche Telekom, Chunghwa Telecom, GQ, Vogue, and Getty, and it seems to be grabbing the bull by its horns in a time of remote working, social distancing, and everything in between as the world adapts to the new normal.

Source:

Former HTC CEO Unveils 5G-enabled VR Headset & Social VR Platform

3. Juni 2020 0 comment

Knowledge Research

Sexualization Of Female Avatars Contributes To Harassment In Social VR

This is the second installment in a series about what makes avatars useful in Social VR environments.

How do avatars change the way we interact with each other in Social VR? Virtual worlds give us the freedom to take on physical forms that we can’t inhabit in real life, but taking on these avatars also means experiencing the biases that come with them.

In some avatars, this may mean experiencing prejudices that you face on a daily basis while in other avatars it may mean experiencing biases you never considered confronting as a human being—such as the prejudice faced by a robot, or a bunny rabbit. Regardless of what avatar you choose, what you are really experiencing is the cultural conditioning around certain populations, species, and archetypes, as well as the personal biases people hold for or against these groups.

As one person from a Social VR platform reported, “It’s better to be a hedgehog than a little person.”

In other words, people have far more associations about little people and their capabilities rather than a woodland creature.

At their best, avatars can lead to more empathy. Studies have shown that when the young people embody elderly avatars their bias against the elderly decreases. Similarly, when white people embody black avatars, implicit bias against black people decreases. But at their worst, avatars can lead to—and even encourage—experiences of harassment.

Avatars and Sexual Harassment

In 2017, my company, The Extended Mind, conducted a study in which we introduced women to Social VR for the first time. Many of them chose to inhabit robot avatars. When asked why, they expressed concern about being a female avatar in an anonymous online space.

“It was kind of nice just being a generic avatar because I kind of got the feeling from the beginning, like if I had been a blonde girl,” one subject reported. “If I was an attractive avatar it would be weird…like unwanted attention and they would all talk to me and be annoying.”

Receiving unwanted attention is something young women are familiar with. And when Social VR spaces appear full of men, or hedgehogs, or robots (even if women were the ones actually embodying them), it gives the impression that there aren’t women there. One research participant from this study said she would have liked to see other female avatars to feel less alone.

Female avatars tend to receive a lot of attention in Social VR. Women report that this attention is usually unwanted, and often sexual in nature: 49% of women have reported experiencing sexual harassment in social VR. What accounts for these high statistics?

The sexual attention directed at women has many origins. The anonymity that online spaces offer harassers is a contributing factor, but doesn’t explain all of it. Women are sexually harassed in non-anonymous contexts, too.

We want to draw attention to the hypersexualized female avatars that are offered in many Social VR platforms. Essentially, the types of avatars offered by any platform could contribute to the harassment of women because because feminine qualities are not valued. Instead of presenting women as whole-being creatures with humanity, sexualized avatars reduce women to body parts.

If Social VR environments encourage spaces and present default avatars that show femininity is valued, then it becomes more likely that women will feel safe expressing femininity.

The Affordance of Avatars

In behavioral science, the term, “affordance” usually refers to complementarity between actors and their environments. But I’d like to suggest that affordances also exist between actors. By this I mean that around each actor there are a set of expectations about how that actor should be treated based on their perceived age, race, gender, class, and the contexts in which they are situated in popular culture.

Young women, for instance, are the population most affected by sexual harassment. This is not because young women want to be harassed, but because ‘youth’ and ‘femininity’ are two of the most sexualized traits in American culture. In Social VR, this tendency towards the harassment of young women is exaggerated by the hypersexualization of female avatars.

Whether it’s the elf girl with voluptuous breasts, the young anime girl in a short skirt, or the woman dressed in a skintight jumpsuit, all of these avatars exaggerate standards of female beauty and play on sexual tropes. The anime girl, for example, is a classic example of the fetishization of young Asian women. In anime, the girls are drawn to exaggerate their sex appeal and depictions emphasis their body parts rather than their humanity.

Media has trained us to see anime girls as sexual objects. Of course avatars with such associations are going to experience harassment.

When designers offer sexualized female avatars as the default, they are creating a space where ‘femininity’ doesn’t feel safe. It’s no wonder that many women choose to don gender-neutral robot avatars for their first forays into Social VR.

To be fair to designers, not all Social VR platforms sexualize their female avatars. And almost all VR platforms allow you to customize your avatar, at which point you have the option to design a female avatar who can present a more balances or complex version of herself. But it’s important that we examine and acknowledge what contributes to harassment in Social VR.

Quelle:

https://vrscout.com/news/sexualization-of-females-social-vr/

Image Credit: Veeso / V- -R

20. Dezember 2018 0 comment

Knowledge Research

Complementarity Between Avatars & Environments In Social VR

This is the first installment in a series about what makes avatars useful in Social VR environments.

Author’s note: Many of the anecdotes about avatars that get recounted are about unfettered self-expression. And how Social VR platforms allow people to finally express who they really are, and control exactly how they are perceived by those around them.

I believe that many of the stories my Social VR peers repeat represent outliers for multiple reasons – including many people not having a safe outlet for self-expression in their real life, or they are folks with excellent 3D art skills who can customize their avatars to a very high degree. This series of posts is intended to give other considerations about what makes an avatar useful beyond radical self-expression. Throughout this introduction, we’ll look at how creating psychological ease between the avatars and the environment can increase motivation and change user behavior.

***

In Social VR, you can fulfill fantasies that are impossible in real life. You can be a half cat-half robot swimming in a pool, a rabbit making art out of thin air, or a wooden doll meditating by the ocean. Avatars offer new possibilities for embodiment, but creating complementarity between an avatar’s designs and it environment can be a challenge for VR creators.

In behavioral science, complementarity between people and their environment is an affordance, which means that we interact with it more seamlessly. It is easier to work out in a gym, for instance, dressed in sweatpants than in formal evening attire due to the functionality of exercise clothes and the psychological ease of wearing them at a gym (not attracting attention from other people, not fretting about sweat stains on silk, and not worrying about long fabric getting caught on the treadmill).

However, consider many large gatherings of avatars in Social VR and many avatar representations seem out of place. VR night clubs are full of a mixture of robots, military men, and anime girls. One research participant of mine compared her experience of a club in VR to being in the Star Wars cantina.

But what do these avatars have to do with dancing? And how might the avatars users choose effect how they relate to their environment?

People infer expected behaviors and attitudes from their appearance.

On a practical level, affordances are not an issue in VR. Robot and animal avatars have been anthropomorphized to allow them to act in the world as humans do; the lack of opposable thumbs is inconsequential.

But on a cognitive level, the lack of affordance may obstruct some of VR’s more cutting-edge applications due to the lack of psychological ease that users experience. Holding social events with a mixture of avatars representing animals, robots, humans, and the Alien from Alien will change the nature of them.

Social psychology studies have documented the ways that dress affects our thinking and behavior – it’s a subfield called ‘Enclothed Cognition.’ When people wear a white coat that they believe belongs to a physician (rather than a painter), they perform better on cognitive tasks that require a high level of attention. And when people dress in formal clothing, they are better at abstract thinking.

Researchers Nick Yee, Jeremy Bailenson, and Nicolas Ducheneaut have built upon the enclothed cognition research and showed that changing virtual self-representation also has the ability to affect human behavior. The Proteus Effect (named after a shape-shifting Greek God) showed that people inferred expected behaviors and attitudes from their appearance.

Participants who were embodied as tall avatars negotiated more firmly than those who were short (displaying dominance) and people randomized to appear as tall and attractive avatars performed better than peers who happened to be placed in avatars that were shorter and less attractive.

The biggest relevance Yee’s research is showing is that participants who experienced themselves as tall and attractive, even briefly, were more likely to come to the aid of others after the VR session ended.

Altering your sense of self is rather different from radical self-expression as a motivator for avatar creation. However, VR platform owners have the capability to limit avatar options inside of their realms as a means of influencing behavior.

Creating complementarity between user’s avatars and environments can shape users mental models for those VR destinations. In fact, I would be interested in conducting an avatar exercise study and test if avatars dressed in virtual fancy clothes work out as vigorously as those wearing gym clothes. While there’s no difference functionally, I believe that the dissonance between the fancy clothes and the gym would lower people’s effort.

While these subtle, and often unacknowledged, alterations to our behavior may not be all that significant in casual social situations, how we perform in negotiations has real-life consequences. While Social VR is still in its infancy, we should consider examining the ways in which the eclectic range of avatars changes how we interact with our environments, as well as each other.

References:

Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918-925.

Slepian, M. L., Ferber, S. N., Gold, J. M., & Rutchick, A. M. (2015). The cognitive consequences of formal clothing. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(6), 661-668.

Yee, N., & Bailenson, J. (2007). The Proteus effect: The effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. Human communication research, 33(3), 271-290.