Re-Evaluating VR User Awareness Needs During Bystander Interactions

Virtual reality (VR) users are often around bystanders, i.e. people in the real world the VR user may want to interact with. To facilitate bystander-VR user interactions, technology-mediated awareness systems have been introduced to increase a user’s awareness of bystanders. However, while prior works have found effective means of facilitating bystander-VR user interactions, it is unclear when and why one awareness system should be used over another. We reviewed, and selected, a breadth of bystander awareness systems from the literature and investigated their usability, and how they could be holistically used together to support varying awareness needs across 14 bystander-VR user interactions. Our results demonstrate VR users do not manage bystander awareness based solely on the usability of awareness systems but rather on the demands of social context weighted against desired immersion in VR (something existing evaluations fail to capture) and show the need for socially intelligent bystander awareness systems.