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As social Virtual Reality (VR) grows in prevalence, new possibilities for embodied and immersive social interaction emerge, including varied forms of interpersonal harm. Yet, challenges remain regarding defining, identifying, and mitigating said harm in social VR. In this paper, we take an alternative approach to understanding and designing solutions for interpersonal harm in social VR through the lens of consent, which circumvents the lack of consensus and social norms on what should be defined as harm in social VR and reflects the embodied, immersive, and offline-world-like nature of harm in social VR. Through interviews with 39 social VR users, we offer one of the first empirical explorations on how social VR users understand consent as boundaries, (re)purpose existing social VR features for practicing consent as boundary setting, and envision the design of future consent mechanics in social VR to balance protection and interaction expectations to mitigate interpersonal harm as boundary violations in social VR. This work makes significant contributions to CSCW and HCI research by (1) uncovering how social VR users craft novel conceptualizations of consent as boundaries and harm as unwanted boundary violations, and (2) providing three foundational principles for designing future consent mechanics in social VR informed by actual social VR users.
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This content will become publicly available on June 9, 2026
Making Computer Science Concepts Visible and Virtually Tangible through Creative Coding in Virtual Reality
Abstract: Embodied Code is a visual programming language in virtual reality (VR). It introduces novices to fundamental computing concepts and immersive game engines through hands-on creative coding. Unlike traditional creative coding toolkits, this system harnesses the visuospatial and kinesthetic affordances of VR to engage users in embodied computer science learning. Coders are afforded considerable flexibility in placing, rearranging, and manipulating elements of code (nodes and connectors) and its output such that space and movement can be leveraged as organizational and conceptual scaffolds. Further, assembling nodes and connectors is guided by two simple principles – input versus output and events versus data. These design principles were adopted to foster analogical mappings between physical experiences of working with code and output in an immersive virtual space and perception and action in the real world. Further, they were purposed for exploring different levels of coding abstraction in classroom use.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2017042
- PAR ID:
- 10609182
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Society of the Learning Sciences
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 3079-9929
- ISBN:
- 979-8-9906980-2-4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Helsinki, Finland
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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