Vice VRsa: Balancing Bystander's and VR user’s Privacy through Awareness Cues Inside and Outside VR

Youngwook Do, Frederik Brudy, George W. Fitzmaurice, Fraser Anderson

Abstract:

The immersive experience of Virtual Reality (VR) disconnects VR users from their physical surroundings, subjecting them to surveillance from bystanders who could record conversations without consent. While recent research has sought to mitigate this risk (e.g., VR users can stream a live view of their surrounding area into VR), it does not address that bystanders are conversely being recorded by the VR stream without their knowledge. This creates a causality dilemma where the VR user’s privacy-enhancing activities raise the bystander’s privacy concerns.
We introduce Vice VRsa, a system that provides awareness of bystander presence to VR users as well as a VR user's monitoring status to bystanders.
This work seeks to provide a framework and set of interactions for considering mutual awareness and privacy for both VR users and bystanders. Results from preliminary interviews with VR experts suggest factors for privacy implications in designing VR interactions in public physical spaces.

Track: HCI/visualization

Revision: No

Revision Reviewers: No opinion

Summary Of Changes:

<Clarify and better state the contribution>
- We clarified the contribution of our work as a novel concept and an exemplary set of interactions that demonstrate the concept through the implementation.
- Expanded our discussion point 6.4, reflecting on the need of people having to actually follow the social protocol, limitations of interpretation and learnability of a color coding system, as well as a potential detrimental"honeypot effect" of using intriguing / inviting awareness cues.
- We added more descriptions regarding the limitation. First, we acknowledge that our system requires users to be communicated about the color code of privacy modes. Additionally, we describe more complicated and nuanced cases that would happen in the real world (e.g., bystanders may exploit the red privacy mode for intentional eavesdropping), and state that it is required to study further to handle such cases.

<Presentation of design rationales>
- We improved the explanation regarding the design choice of the interactions.
--- We clarified why left/right distinction was chosen for Halo as a means to communicate a ‘rough’ indication of presence, direction, and distance with minimal interruption to VR experiences.
--- Added details on how we implemented the close, medium, and far distance detection for our proof-of-concept implementation, specific to our physical lab space. Highlighted on multiple occasions that the projector was mounted above the VR user’s play area using a tripod.

<Details of the study procedures>
- We added more details on the study procedure in a new subsection 5.1.
- In addition, we have attached the study protocol and questionnaire as supplemental material.

<Other changes>
- In Figure 4, we have included a label indicating that the projector of the system is beyond the frame of the figure.
- We updated our video submission, adding the author's information.
- Minor edits throughout for concise language, correcting typos, etc.