On Seeing and Being Seen in VR
Helmets are troublesome in VR. While they’re easy enough to create, anything that covers a player avatar’s entire face (think, Ironman or Darth Vader) presents the 100% predictable problem of obscuring or eliminating vision. I had a solution for this! When placed on the head, I made the helmet invisible to the wearer, but visible to everyone else. It worked great! Problem solved?
Not quite.
Actually, it created a new problem. Namely, it wasn’t any fun. Or rather it’s fun for everyone EXCEPT the wearer, because they couldn’t see themselves wearing the thing they wanted to wear. Their experience was ruined. Now imagine trying to offer that helmet as an in-world cosmetic purchase. People would be annoyed - livid! - if their purchase disappeared on them. No one (except a deluded emperor) will buy clothing they can’t experience wearing. This got me thinking about identity expression in VR.
In one sense, my VR avatar is fully me, since I am seeing through my own eyes and moving my own body and hands. And yet, counterintuitively, I feel less conscious of my VR-self because I can’t see it. Non-VR games and social experiences (like Fortnite) that have extensive costumes and customization (and a related economy) are ones where you can see your character wearing these items in a third-person view. You identify with your external avatar both because you control it and experience how it represents you. Moreover - and this is key - you're constantly conscious about how these choices express your identity not just to others, but to you as you watch yourself. So, if you don't see yourself or experience being seen, there’s less incentive to care about what you look like.
It’s not just an issue for sales of digital clothing. It also creates a challenge for cultivating a shared sense of community in virtual spaces. Participation in fashion communicates a desire to see and be seen, while reinforcing the role of public experiences where where that seeing can occur. Fortnite costumes and emotes are not just tools for self expression. They signal the desire to participate in a common shared space. On the flip side, wearing the basic skin suggests that you’ve opted out of the shared experience and just want to shoot some stuff.
Indeed, digital community builders have observed that users with elaborate (or weird) avatars tend to be the most invested in the community. Trolling and other disruptions often come from those with the plainest avatars.
This all suggests that VR designers should do more to reflect a user's appearance back to them. How? In-world mirrors are an obvious answer. And indeed, in places like VRChat, they are a frequent social hub. But, mirrors also present immense computational and performance challenges (since you’re essentially asking the world to double itself). So what else can we do?
- Build out clothing options that appear readily in a person’s line of sight, such as gloves, watches, and bracelets.
- For headwear, add unique elements at the top or sides of the player’s field of view that evoke the style of the object worn.
- Display a full body representation of the player’s avatar and current wearables in the menu or inventory.
- Make in-world photos/selfies quick to create and easy to display.
There are surely other ways of getting at this, but the point is to visually reinforce to the player how they appear to others. Otherwise, how can we expect them to see themselves both literally and figuratively as part of a VR space (or to want to buy stuff in it)?
A Note on Legs: The recent introduction of avatar legs into Horizon Worlds presents an interesting study in representational trade-offs. On one hand, my avatar is more myself with legs, because I have legs in the physical world. On the other hand, these legs and their movement are disembodied from me. They’re created entirely by the game engine, and do not track my actual legs. Nor should they! While I may be running/jumping/flying in Vr, I am usually just sitting. Meta’s solution for this - and I think it’s the right one - is to show the legs of others, but not show your own legs to you. This seems a lot like the solution that didn’t quite work for helmets, but in this context it makes sense, as a mismatch between one’s felt body and their presented body would decrease the feeling of self-representation.
