Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: Supporting Flexible and Safe Disability Representation in Social Virtual Reality

Social Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging social medium, where a user immerses in a 3D virtual space in the form of an avatar and interacts with others via speech and body gestures. This technology can improve the social life of people with disabilities (PWD) since it simulates the real-world "face-to-face" social experience and can mitigate barriers to interaction that PWD can face in the physical world.

The use of avatars also allows PWD to flexibly express their identity, curating desired social images that may be more or less connected to their disabilities. However, current social VR platforms are immature in supporting inclusive identity representation for PWD, in terms of how well avatars' appearance, sounds, and behavior can support desired self-representations.

Moreover, even effective tools for identity expression can lead to stigma and risks for PWD due to the lack of well-established social norms in social VR and the stigma PWD often suffer. This project promotes inclusion and equity for PWD by investigating how to support flexible and safe disability representation in social VR. By studying PWD's experiences and preferences through close co-design work, the project team will make both theoretical and technical contributions, including design guidelines for inclusive disability expression, theoretical models of risks for PWD in social VR, and technologies and toolkits that mitigate those risks.

This project aims to facilitate an inclusive and harmonious social VR environment for PWD. To achieve this goal, the team focuses on two main questions: (1) How to support flexible disability representation without causing misconceptions or triggering stigma? (2) How to define and mitigate the risks caused by disability disclosure in social VR? To answer these questions, the team will follow human-centered computing approaches that deeply engage people with diverse disabilities across the research process.

First, the team will conduct interview studies to build an in-depth understanding of the identity representation preferences and needs of PWD from both avatar and voice perspectives. Second, the team will conduct a diary study to identify the social dynamics caused by disability disclosure in social VR, resulting in a theoretical risk model that characterizes the types and severity of risks PWD may experience.

Last, the team will design, implement, and evaluate a set of risk mitigation mechanisms via participatory design workshops. The validated mechanisms will be disseminated as an open source Unity toolkit for researchers and developers to build upon; meanwhile, the methods and technologies developed should be adaptable to other questions around inclusion and safety in social VR.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.