Although social support can be a vital component of gender and sexual identity formation, many LGBTQ+ individuals often lack offline social networks for such support. Traditional online technologies also reveal several challenges in providing LGBTQ+ individuals with effective social support. Therefore, social VR, as a unique online space for immersive and embodied experiences, is becoming popular within LGBTQ+ communities for supportive online interactions. Drawing on 29 LGBTQ+ social VR users’ experiences, we investigate the types of social support LGBTQ+ users have experienced through social VR and how they leverage unique social VR features to experience such support. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR innovates traditional online support mechanisms to empower LGBTQ+ individuals but leads to new safety and equality concerns. We also propose important principles for rethinking social VR design to provide all users, rather than just the privileged few, with supportive experiences.
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"Acting Out" Queer Identity: The Embodied Visibility in Social Virtual Reality
This paper focuses on embodied visibility emerging in social Virtual Reality (VR) as a new lens to explore how queer users build and experience visibility in nuanced ways. Drawing on 29 queer social VR users’ experiences across various countries and cultures, we identify three main strategies for building and experiencing embodied visibility in social VR, limitations of each strategy, and impacts of such visibility on queer users’ identity practices online and offline. We broaden current studies on queer visibility online and expand the traditional lens of selective visibility by highlighting how embodiment both supports and challenges the multidimensional online presentations of queer identity. We also propose potential design considerations to further support diverse queer users’ visibility in social VR and inform future directions for creating inclusive online social experiences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2112878
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10355705
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on humancomputer interaction
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- CSCW2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-32
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3555153
