Building VR Communities: Asymmetry, Asynchrony, and Abuse

[Music] yeah thankfully thankfully they understand that a lot of us are like game developers and we don't expect to do anything before 10:00 a.m. so a nice late morning start so we're gonna be talking about building VR communities asymmetry asynchrony and abuse I'm sure it was the alliteration that drew you all to this talk or maybe just the confusion about what the heck are you gonna be talking about my name is Rob I am I'm currently the manager for for Google Earth VR it's with a company called Google you might have heard of it we do some search stuff and some crazy some crazy stuff on the team called daydream previously I worked with daydream labs so if you've seen me speak at VR DC before or GC it was probably my work on daydream labs that I was up here talking about so during my time there I think we did about 120 different crazy little VR prototypes one week at a time I think that team is now up to about a hundred and sixty 170 prototypes and before Google about two and a half years ago I spent eight years running a small

game studio called lazy 8 Studios we did a really cool game called cogs that you might have heard of a really cool game called extrasolar that you probably haven't heard of but you should play anyway because it's really cool and I'm gonna have to discontinue it soon because it's way too expensive to run we're gonna be talking today about basically design considerations for VR and AR applications so let's dig into this what am I talking about when I'm talking about design considerations let's kind of like let's take a trip into the future ten years from now and look back at this era in VR development from that perspective and and see what we see we have this huge number of dimensions that we can develop in so you can think about soullow versus multiplayer experiences entertainment experiences educational experiences functional experiences like tools cooperative versus adversarial consumer versus enterprise applications in my mind when I look at these categories where I see is this huge multi-dimensional space of various experiences that can exist in VR

and AR and we have explored almost none of that area like if you take the cross product of all of these different categories our explorations are so small right now so so what do we do about then we're gonna look back in ten years and we're gonna be like oh my god how did no one even see like genre ex coming like they're these their entire genres of games that we have not imagined yet but specifically for this talk I want to talk about three of these attributes that I think are not getting enough discussion right now asymmetric experiences asynchronous experiences and dealing with abuse and abuse especially for embodied avatars and VR - VR experiences so we're gonna dig into all these in detail but let me first of all roll back a little bit more to the familiar experiences that we all know and love VR - VR experiences you've got two players with compatible hardware you know six off headsets six and you've got head and hands these this is like you know this is an amazing space in VR this

absolutely represents the future unquestionably and it's just a ton of fun so I'm gonna show just a few examples here this one is from a tilt brush prototype that we put together not officially launched yet but we've shared this a little bit you know and be representing here the explosion the volcanic explosion of possibilities in virtual reality this is one of those little experiments that we did with daydream labs so we've got a couple players in a space together working on a shared interface which was specifically what we were looking at here how that would work doing some educational stuff together so they're solving some physics problems together we've talked at Google i/o about about YouTube so we have a co-presidents YouTube application on the way it's a little bit different form of co-present so your friends appear on kind of a dock space in front of you and you can interact with them we've got a rec room I think everybody here is probably spend a little bit of time in a rec room this is a great multiplayer experience the other day I went into the wave VR this is kind of one of the newer co-presence applications so this virtual rave really beautiful experience

different every time you go into it but in this particular case when I went into the wave VR I was the only person there and that's kind of expected though the way that the wave deals with this kind of the slow emergence the slow growth of VR and VR communities is their scheduled times that people come in together and raves together which depending on what time zone you're on may work well or may not work very well so it's a beautiful event you know this is this is definitely the future of VR to VR but at the same time you know this needs a schedule events indicates a limitation how can we get around these limitations so specifically let's think about it like with VR 2 VR experiences what's the probability that your close friend also has a VR headset that's compatible with yours they've purchased the same application they're online right now in the same application that you're in it's basically zero so so you know when we're talking about VR 2 VR experiences we're gonna fill out this chart over time but when we talk about VR 2 VR

experiences we know that's the future it's really cool it's really engaging your feel like you're there with your friends but the audience right now is basically 0 friends and a few strangers how are we going to fix this so let me put out a kind of a bold statement out there that I want to I want to toss around for the for the duration of this talk the most inviting VR applications are they going to be are going to be the ones that understand how to engage those who aren't in VR so one more time the most inviting VR apps are going to be the ones who understand how to engage those who aren't in VR so why is this important they're just they're just aren't that many people in VR so so let's get back to those two those criteria that I brought up previously a cemetry asynchrony and abuse and and sort of Express this as a series of lenses so the first lens is how can I engage a larger audience by making this experience asymmetric and Daniel's going to get up here later and talk about this in a lot more detail the second lens is

how can I build an audience by considering different modalities of engagement and this is this is like this one didn't fit into our little is alliterative title it didn't start with an A but this is closely coupled with that first design lens so when we talk about asymmetry we're going to talk a lot about modalities of engagement the third one is what's the benefit of allowing my users to engage with an experience asynchronously over time and finally how how is your application going to handle abuse size going to get up here and talk extensively about abuse so let's dig into a little bit more of the definitions of these words so when I talk about asymmetric experiences what I'm talking about is letting users on different devices interact with experience and this is very tightly coupled with this idea of modalities of engagement so we've talked about VR - VR but what about VR - desktop the mirror window that we take for granted the Daniel's going to talk about what about VR - TV via your chromecast VR - phone VR de AR and we're gonna also kind of toss out a fun experimental piece that we the Daniel is going to show on ar2a

our experiences next we have asynchronous so in this case we're talking about allowing users to participate in a shared experience even though they're participating even though they're not participating at the same time maybe the classic example this is farmville like you can go in and see your other friends farms and see how they're changing you can see that they've recently adopted a purple cow even if they're not on their farm right now and finally abuse this is just going to be a big one I think we're gonna be talking about this a lot more as we go through VR DC's and G DCs and figure out how to deal with this issue this is fourth design lens we just need to consider potential for abuse in the very earliest stages of design once again size gonna get up and talk about that later so next I'm gonna hand it off to Daniel and he's gonna talk about asymmetry asynchrony and modalities of engagement thanks Rob hi there I'm Daniel I'm a VR and AR designer and prototype ER at

Google today I'm gonna be talking to you about two of the lenses Rob brought up earlier specifically a symmetry and a synchrony I'm going to be showing a bunch of different experiments an example so we've done these areas and focus on a variety of different modalities engagements including VR 2 2 d vr 2 AR and AR 2 air first I'd like to talk to you about the type of asymmetry that we often take for granted the mirror window mode the mirror window mode is in a fantastic way of getting people who are in the room with someone in VR but not in VR engaged within the experience great tools like unity and unreal have made it super easy to implement it's often a no-brainer however it's surprising how much you miss it when it's not implemented a great example a great example of this is when we launched Google Earth initially we didn't have a mirror window mode in oculus when Google Earth came out I was super excited invited my parents over to try it my dad jumped into VR and my mom sat on the couch my dad loved it he was

exploring all these different cities but my mom kind of sat there frustration she kept asking what's going on and I couldn't really help her out it was overall kind of a frustrating experience a couple weeks later the team updated to have a mirror window man and it was a completely different experience my dad again jumped into VR but now I was offering different places he could explore my mom was pointing out things that he missed ultimately we were kind of like backseat driving and VR as great as a lot of fun on daydream we saw how valuable the second screen experience was so over the summer we announced that we're going to be adding casting support to the data and headset this means that you can share the view of any of your daydream experiences to any cast enabled device in the house this transforms a single person VR experience to something that's fun for anyone on the couch or anyone in the room so like I said we love the mirror window mode but we think we can take a step further interactive asymmetry lets the users not in VR

engage in the experience in a much more meaningful way couple example of this it could be super simple things giving the user the ability to move the camera around look at the scene from different perspectives or coming up with interesting interaction models between those in VR and there's non VR that lean on the advantages of both mediums an example of this could be someone's in a cave and VR and the other person has a map and they have to work together and talk together so it becomes a fun experience for everyone else alchemy labs in their app job simulator launched a spectator cam feature as you can see here it's the normal mirror window mode initially first-person but by simply by clicking click the cycle cameras you're able to switch views now why is this important mirror window is great however when is the first person view and VR it's often a little confusing for people outside VR to understand what's happening the camera moves around a lot you kind of just get a sense of what people are looking at in that moment their hands however once you

start allowing people to move the cameras around get different perspectives you get a sense of the avatars you get a better sense of the environment and what's happening throughout the experience more fun for the people outside more people able to understand you can also do this through chromecast so this is a custom chromecast view this was a app that the daydream Labs team put together where you could see a lot of what makes this app fun is the expressions on the people's faces the character design and the interactions between them have this just been simply a mirror mode then all you would see would be lots of great shots of the environment and while the environments beautiful that's not kind of what makes this app special so simply by writing a custom chromecast protocol and putting in a third camera you're able to achieve a much more exciting experience for those outside VR now this expands beyond just TVs and your monitors it also expands the devices

that in your pocket this was an experiment that our daydream labs team did where they were analyzing how to translate the great act of reading your kid a storybook to VR so in this case the child goes in the VR and gets to witness all the exciting amazing things of immersive storytelling the parent using the device that's just in their pocket can not only see where the child is looking but what they're focusing on what they're excited about what they're interacting and can walk them through the story it becomes a much more interactive experience and becomes more of a conversation than a single person highlighting experience another great way of doing asymmetry is through livestream while the other examples were specifically for the people who were in that room live-streaming gives you the opportunity to share out through YouTube or twitch to anyone who happens to be watching in real time and then save it for later for anyone who is not now this is also another method that you can enhance by making more interactive you can see here that the team at fantastic

contraption that is awesome thing where not only are they streaming out live but they're also bringing in the live twitch comments so again it becomes this more interactive conversation between the people in VR and those outside vr so asymmetry lets us share experiences across devices as also asynchrony lets us share experiences across time so why is this important VR to VR asymmetry these are awesome experiences however the amount of simultaneous users is inherently limited at the moment either by the people who are in the room or those who are there in real-time online by sharing out you dramatically increase your potential audience not only through the amount of users through time but also through the amount of form factors that can access it a great example of this is through YouTube so you can see here this is a video from tilt brush someone

painted this incredibly beautiful painting of Wonder Woman it's 3d it's awesome but not only is this just a video capture it's actually a stereo 360 capture of the scene so that means as a viewer online I'm able to interact with the scene look and focus on what I think is interesting and important if I think the background is awesome I can focus on now if I like these characters or explosions whatever I want and what's great about this is not only is it available on your web but it's also available on a variety of different form factors so if I just take my phone open this video I can navigate the scene by just moving my phone around or if I pop in a cardboard or daydream device I can view it and beautiful stereo another avenue for sharing out is through mixed reality captures this is super cool so what this basically is if you haven't seen it before is it superimposing a real video of the person who's using the VR experience within the VR experience itself so why is this important well there are a lot of people out there who have yet to try

the awesomeness of VR and when thinking about sharing out this is a great way that we can make we are much more accessible for people who have an experience that who don't understand what motion controllers are or a headset are and ultimately make it a much more human experience now what about a synchrony within VR and AR experiences how can we make more awesome asynchronous experience well we love the idea that when you interact with a virtual world just like in the real world it leaves a lasting effect your presence matters in this in this demo above you can see someone tending to their gardener making changes choosing the veggies to plant they're making an effect on the world the next time someone goes into the app they can see all the decisions the previous person made it allows for a sense of community even when people aren't in the app at the same time so that's sharing out now we got another one in here V air to air with a launch of a are enabled

smartphones soon to be on hundreds of millions of phones soon many people will have a sixth off enabled device in their pockets this enables new types of interactivity that build off of some of the things I talked about with sharing out but allow you to also utilize spatial inner information and touch interaction this was an example we built its kind of dark you can't see it but it's of a social moviemaking app basically you can grab a bunch of objects and props from the scene throw it onto the stage and animate them with another person simply by picking them up clicking record and moving them around and making them throughout the scene we wanted an awesome way to share out so we came up with this idea of putting a little camera in the scene you can see loads of viewfinder on that camera and one person can shrink down to the size of a stage and film the scene creating an awesome video for YouTube viewable in many different formats we think it's super fun people came up with really really fun stories that we shared out internally we thought this was fun but

we wanted to push ourselves to think about new ways to engage other form factors particularly ar we came up with this concept how can we use the sixth off AR phones that we have to interact with this kind of scene in this case you can see that we replace that camera I showed in the last scene with the actual AR view so what that means is it's no longer just a viewing experience the person in AR is actually the person who creates the output the thing that goes on YouTube it engages them it becomes less of I get the lesser experience because I'm not in VR and more of working together a companion experience there's a lot of possibilities when building AR to VR interactions we're really excited to see what you guys come up with so finally a our day are we're incredibly excited with how multiplayer can make a our experience is more awesome we want

to show a fun experiment that we do in this area we call this AR boat race both people have their own boats in their hand from their phone they're placed spatially within the scene and all they have to do is blow on the phone and push the sails down the scene you can see it's super simple it's really fun and people who do it get really competitive you can see right now Kevin's in the lead but Samantha's catching up quickly and Samantha gets across the finish line so like I said it's super simple but just the easy way of making this multiplayer using the space and using novel input methods makes it a really really fun interactive experience so there's a lot of awesome right now in VR and AR incredible platforms new tech and near experiences more and more every day we think it's super important to be creative and thinking about how you can combine all these awesome emerging technologies to better create interact

and make the content more consumable for those in VR and non VR we've talked a lot about creating awesome social experiences but creating these experiences also comes with a large responsibility thinking about and mitigating abuse to talk more about this Oh people are tall I new friends I'm psy wise I work at alchemy labs I am their studio director al-mansur and also science you may have noticed that a job simulator and Rick and Morty virtual reality neither one are multi presence VR experiences so why the heck am I here so oh I want that one yes hello so my background in academia and things so my backgrounds in sociology I focused specifically on videogame communities digital tribes

internet fandoms addition to that also computer mediated communication basically looking at emergent technologies and how people connect using awesome wild cool tech and form groups and you know make communities I'm also an eleven year industry vet and the majority of that was actually massively multiplayer online role-playing games I worked for NCsoft for a long time worked on AI on lineage City of Heroes Guild Wars all these games and a lot of what I did there was I actually meant the harassment Department sort of dealing with people who had been harassed looking at different types of harassment and helping people out I also happen to be both privately and publicly a woman on the internet I have occasionally engaged in business or entertainment activities on the Internet given opinions all of which add up to knowing about harassment so before I get too far along I want to preemptively apologize it sucks that we have to talk about this VR is such a cool medium and it's so

optimistic and we think about all the things like VR alone makes you think about what's possible that was never possible before and then we have to spend time talking about abuse and people are gonna be rude so I want to thank you all for being here and being willing to think about this and talk about this and also now that I've said it now you can't leave early ah did you see what I did there so I want to start with some definitions sort of a taxonomy of harassment so this can sort of break down into several modes that people are going to be gross to each other one is auditory saying gross things this is basically using voice chat or text sending emails just being rude saying rude things to other people in a rude way is auditory gestural is using rudimentary gestures to convey Kuras concepts in massively multiplayer games this has been sort of like using emotes or whatever using

rough gestures that are available and stringing them together in a sort of way that conveys gross concepts in VR especially with sixth off hands you have a whole new range of gross gestural experiences because we are very creative as human beings then we also have environmental this is basically using the elements of the environment in gross ways in traditional games this could be the sort of thing so like in traditional MMOs would be the sort of thing of dragging higher-level monsters into a low-level area to like wipe all of the newbies and just basically be giant jerks in VR especially with sixth off had in hands an interactive environment this can be the sort of things like you know throwing things at people constantly you know putting objects on people's heads obscuring their ability to sort of interact with the world and now with VR there's bodily bodily is using one's own body to be gross to another person's body and this is a sort

of new to VR basically because we have embodied avatars you're able to sort of interact with each other touch and interact and move around other people's bodies in heck in gross ways and between the sense of presence and the freedom of six Dolf movement even if these existed in other sorts of environments it becomes incredibly heightened and magnified in VR so what's currently being talked about because I am not the first to talk about it VR is actually identified this as a problem and a lot of people engaging in or who are creating social VR experiences are talking about VR and they are trying to implement things so most of what's being talked about right now really revolves around tools specifically tools for the harrassed this the block and ignore feature is one that is in most VR games now this is alt space has the ability to basically block any character this is useful for VR with limited or a broad range of interaction abilities so alt

space is you can use it in the oculus rift or you can use it in the vive but you can also access it with a cardboard or gear VR you can even get through it with a web browser so having the same way to block somebody no matter what technology are using is really useful for them so that people don't have to figure out the new way to block somebody in a new in a new situation rec room is another one they have a gestural movement which is actually being talked about a lot this is basically the ability to okay Lou yeah so this is basically when you actually use an actual gesture this works incredibly well with sixth off hand tracking and it's commonly agreed-upon that this gesture based or other physical resource is really instant and gratifying not only does it act sort of as like it's just constantly in your back pocket you don't have to let go through menu systems to try and figure out where the block is it's just always there and

available to you and the other thing is that in in a resource and in a in a VR experience that is very physical having a physical response matches that sort of the desire to respond is to respond physically and having that physical response feels a lot more useful in addition to the fact that a lot of times when people are all getting up in your face they can actually like clip through any UI that you might be using so having a gesture that again you have access to instantly it was really useful in this situation I want to take a quick note here about ghosting versus invisibility so once you block somebody what does it do so in the past rec-room has done a lot of experiences and a lot of experiments rec-room used to use this ghosting ability which is once you've blocked basically everyone turned into a ghost I turn if if someone was harassing me they turn into a ghost I turned into a ghost we're all ghosts to each other and basically what that was supposed to do was sort of tone down their harassment it was supposed to put like a mute on the experience you couldn't hear

them anymore you can see there you know or what their face was doing they didn't have hands and it worked really well in terms of like dimming the emotional response right and again you had an effect on the world I blocked someone something happened unfortunately everybody else could see both of these characters as non ghosts this is really important because harassment often isn't just to harass the individual isn't just to hurt the target it is often very performative harassment is often done for the audience of everyone else to see how edgy they are in harassing these people so even though they're both ghosts the harasser could still see where the originally harassed person was and could still act on them in a way that everybody else could see this is no longer what rec room does rec room now does the invisibility method where both parties become invisible to each other but this was a really interesting experiment was allowed us to find these things out the last another thing that

people are talking about is the personal space bubble high fidelity has one of these which I love it basically allows sort of a ring around people that if they try and cross that ring they just sort of loop out they don't agree in terms of being able to protect people and and set their own boundaries based on what sort of interaction they want and it does it goes a long way in terms of sort of stopping the harassment before it begins at least in terms of bodily harassment they can't even get to you to hurt you the last thing that's being talked about a lot is surveillance and specifically audio and video surveillance it's talked about a lot but it isn't solved this is an incredibly hard problem to solve right now everybody sort of wants the ideal world where like all audio and all video is always record and there's just a buffer running at all times so if somebody gets

harassed they can be like ah I can prove it to you it happened and it was recorded and I have now given you the thing and that would be an ideal situation in order to take action on these individuals who are harassing others unfortunately that's incredibly resource intensive for every single interaction of every human being and in every Lobby and every private Lobby it's it's a huge task and is unsolved so what isn't being talked about [Music] messaging and sharing isn't actually being talked about a whole lot this is getting the word out there are ways that people are talking about their harassment tools and sharing code of conducts and expectations rec-room has a video series called how to wreck room that shows a bunch of different you know tools that they have available there are blogs that people can go and read these all happen outside of the VR experience inside the VR experience people are still working on ways that they can best

communicate expected behavior and tools that people have access to whether this is tutorials or you know notices reading in VR is kind of rough I don't know if I would recommend that but this is the problem and the reason why this is so much a problem is that there are no best practices yet which there's a larger discussion of can there be best practices in VR yet when we're still only been out for about a year and should we have stopped experimenting yet we do need to experiment and continue to do so but the problem without having best practices on this yet is that players don't know where to look for these things if there are best practices and everyone sort of agrees that this is how you find and access this information then players know where to look for this until we have that it's going to be a little bit rough persistent identity permanence of consequences there's still a lot of ability for people to like log out and switch avatars and switch names and come back in and harass people again so even if somebody's been blocked by every single person that game they can just go out and create a new identity

and come back in it makes consequences really impermanent there are ideas that you can actually pull on from other online experiences say reputation systems where you have the sort of persistent like judgment from the community that basically says I am a giant jerk this won't keep people from harassing people entirely but it will help some people decide not to harass people if there is that consequence that they have to carry they're at with them it also allows the community to sort of identify somebody like ah that guy's a hack control I want nothing to do with that human being and sort of avoid that person to begin with so that's something that needs to be talked about a little bit more another thing that's not being talked about much is lack of agency VR is a medium of agency and when an individual is harassed especially bodily when someone's all up in their face like you want to have a physical response right this is why the gesture works really well but again a

lot of times you get the sense that you've lost agency over your own body someone has affected you bodily and you weren't able to stop them and you can't really affect them in the way that you want to affect them because they're intangible so a lot of these tools that we're designing need to sort of have the concept of how do we also give agency back to these players and make them feel comfortable and safe and one with their avatar again the last thing I want to talk about that isn't being talked about is tools for the not immediately hat harassed this is a really nuanced sort of thing that's come up recently this is a quote from Cameron from against gravity it's a really difficult problem full disclosure this was me I was harassed in VR in rec room and I had I went through the whole gamut like the whole I went through the taxonomy I had the whole the whole survey and so as I'm sitting there trying to navigate through my menu system because they didn't know about the gesture yet as I was trying to go through the menu system to figure I was

having a rough time the guy was clipping through my arm so I couldn't get to my menu system and what I did is something that a lot of people do I looked up at my friends who had been spending the past couple of hours with me and they're all looking at their watch now I know because they are my friends that they were also looking for the block button to block somebody but the optics of actually read very much like someone trying to disengage from the experience this is awkward I don't want to be a part of this so I'm just going to flip through my phone so the idea of the optics of the people who want to help out is really important there in terms of giving support to the people who are being harassed additionally there are some people who want like maybe off to the side watching this behavior may find it gross and want nothing to do with it but they don't want to necessarily announce to the world that they're blocking somebody they may be afraid of being attacked themselves if they announce that they're blocking this person so maybe they won't do something a little bit privately

maybe they want to make a show of like yes I support this person and there's some nuances there that hasn't really been discussed so we can experiment right now there's a lot to experiment with in terms of what we can make for VR that works in VR there's some there's you can basically break these down into pre-emptive and reactive sort of tool sets so pre-emptive these are like making design decisions that encourage positive behavior sort of stop the harassment before it begins this can be like allowing players to customize their own levels of interaction before they even get into this space rec room has a little private lobby where people log in and the first thing they end up is in their dorm room and they can choose their avatar like shirts and tear and customize what they want to look like and this is fantastic but could you also choose perhaps the level of interaction you want to have that day maybe you want to meet a whole bunch of cool new people and you want to go out and if it's me I'm gonna talk about my cats but you know you want to go out meet new people

and you know have conversations about VR and you're feeling really positive you could just go out and like set yourself to public and meet all sorts of new people but if you're having a rough day and you just kind of want to hang out with your friends and just like talk about your cats or you know I don't play disc golf or cards against humanity' or whatever it is you want to do could you actually set yourself to basically kind of being invisible so that you can like go out and only be visible to other people on your friends list could you make it so you don't see anyone besides people on your friends list there are ways with VR that people can customize their own experience in VR which I'd really like to see us play with the other thing that you can do is um basically remind people sort of what the expected behavior is and there are things like code of conduct you could do like cool posters on the wall or whatever to sort of remind people of expected behavior but they're also designed considerations that you can make this is something that daydream was working on

it's the dog demo the dogs playing poker demo if I were playing poker I'd want to be a dog so basically the idea is that you have a multi present VR experience where people playing poker and one person loses and it's always me that loses and they get heck and mad and so they stand up and they go over to like I don't give peace of my mind and the entire world goes black and white and it dims a little bit and the person looks around and the only thing that's highlighted is the chair that they were previously sitting in maybe they should go back and sit in that chair that would be fun and that's the sort of like design sort of consideration you can do to encourage people to like engage in good positive behaviors just sort of remind people what's expected and for this sort of situation which is a fairly limited in terms of like you know you're seated and you're playing that works really well reactive designing tools that allow victimized players to protect each other this is after the harassment

has occurred this is already sad times but we want the tools to report and remove the threat instantly we're already working on that with like the block and report buttons we want consistent and clear punishment for offending players I talked about reputation systems earlier these sorts of sort of aspects can sort of like mate sort of reinforce that that culture of not being jerks in VR but a main thing here is you have to make sure that punishments can't be view as rewards or they can't be viewed as fun I've heard everything like oh what if we give them like a dunce cap like if somebody's bad we'll put a dunce cap well apparently if video games have taught me anything is that we are a hack based economy and we want 100 percent of the hats so that's something that somebody might actually seek to go get another one that I love I love this one I hate it but I love it is the idea of like someone's attacking you right so you just push them and if you push them they go flying back and it's

great because you feel super powerful and you feel like you have your agency back and has to add it effective you know that that person's headsets gonna go flying and they might get a little sick and could be cool just feels really good but that's the sort of thing that harassing players would also use to harass people so like these are the sorts of things you have to think about even when you're thinking of tools that you know could be used to help people you have to think about how they are going to be used to not hurt people um also humor I gosh I love I love things that give me a chuckle especially if it's like oh yeah that's like perfect that feels justified so this is an example that also was tested a test people were prototyping this and it was the idea that like if somebody like started like coming at the person their hands would just fall off like if they tried to put their hands in the other person's face they're their avatars hands we just drop and it was awesome and hilarious and it felt right like yeah we took your hands away

unfortunately everyone else thought it was funny too and so people who were who might be harassing wanted their hands to fall off they thought it was hilarious and so it inadvertently could encourage people to harass to see this funny effect so where we didn't go with that one so a note here this is this is all a ton of work these are really hard problems and it's it's a ton of work it's hard it's going to take a lot of time a lot of a lot of human power but the industry as a whole is harmed by putting out a half supported social experience just like all VR a lot of people are going into their first social experiences in VR and a lot of times their first social experiences their first VR experience and so there's a responsibility we have to make sure that the experiences that we're putting forth are as responsible as we possibly can to make sure everyone's enjoying it somebody can be turned off from all of VR by going into a bad social experience I've had any experience so it's really

important that we sort of keep these these things in mind and try and develop good practices as soon as we can the other thing is that tools have to be considered during development build your features and and support structures into your design as you're building as early as you possibly can if you're starting to put in tools after launch like that it's way too late needs to be considered as part of your design because if you are designing a social experience mitigating abuse is part of your experience I also want to touch on the culture thing we have the ability to reinforce culture and also social stigma which is kind of cool culture isn't only enforced from the outside it's encouraging the community to create and normalize behaviors amongst themselves so a lot of what you can do in your game as you're making social experiences isn't just you know a lot of times people think like oh the dev sir mean and this is the nanny state and they just don't want us to they're no fun and they don't want us to have fun

and they're over banning everybody and whatever you can actually encourage your community through culture like through it the culture of your game the culture of your community outreach and sort of transpose that on to your community as well and your community will pick that up and run with it if players have a sense of ownership of their own space and feel like they have the responsibility of protecting their space they will also do this work they are happy to sort of make this space the safe space that they want if you develop a community that sort of promotes that so what am I taking home from all of this one don't let abuse considerations being an afterthought you want to design tools and empower your community from the very beginning so the minute your game launches there should also be a set of tools and abilities for players to be able to protect themselves and sort of promote a good healthy happy community culture and second of all you want to experiment we're still really in the early days of VR and there's so much

that we can sort of play with VR is best done when we're making things for VR that work in VR so we can experiment a lot and and while we're still sort of in our early days we have this opportunity to do so and really figure out what works best we have some things that work but we could find a lot there could be a lot of other things out there that work better or interesting or have these additional side effects that are fantastic but we only find that out through experimenting so try various things try unexpected things silly things stupid things and I would actually encourage you to share with developer community as well we're actually constantly talking about it there are a ton of resources if you want to talk more about abuse and social vr there's like Twitter I highly recommend there's constantly game devs talking about this on Twitter but they're a bunch of slack channels and groups where people are constantly sharing ideas and resources and research to sort of figure out this whole wacky wild world that we're in right now

thank you sigh so I'm just gonna summarize really quickly I some of why you might be thinking like this talk it's kind of all over the place other than three major words that start with the letter A like what ties this all together what's highs it all together is that we really feel like we looked around the design space that people are looking at right now and from the perspective of like once again I'm gonna bring it up we're looking back from 10 years in the future what are we going to look at where did we not spend enough time and we think that these areas that we're talking about today are sort of these design elements where we're not spending enough time not leveraging it enough to build social communities in different ways that were typical so just to sort of give you that you know the take-home I'm going to once once again list those four lenses that we really want you to think about and consider applying to your own projects and thinking about how these these sort of design ideas fit into your personal space so once again how can I

engage a larger audience by making my experiences asymmetric using different devices how can somebody on their smartphone that they haven't in their pocket interface with this with a high end with an experience that somebody else is seeing on a high end VR headset or a daydream headset or in a gear VR closely coupled to that how can I build an audience by considering different modalities of engagement so again the art of phone VR to AR you know think about where that audience is and how we can pull those people in which also includes well let's go to this one asynchronous what's the benefit of allowing my users to engage with an experience asynchronously you know if we want to build viral channels for our VR experiences that's being able to export those experiences to YouTube you know a place where we have an audience of billions that's going to be an important Channel and finally how is your application going to handle abuse we just can't let this be an afterthought so many people are having their first experience in VR today and if their experience is a negative one because of a culture of

abuse or because it wasn't handled properly they're not going to come back for a long time we need to think about abuse from the very beginning and make sure that we're that we're prototyping and I'm thinking more broadly and working hard to answer these questions and with that we have about 15 minutes left for Q&A thank you I know it's early and nobody ever jumps up so I'll get this started yeah so great talk thanks everybody I'm Erin from Google and my question or comment I guess is directed more towards size area so I've been fascinated and terrified by abuse you know like all of us you know a little bit for a long time and I think the problem underlying all of it is the moment we take a conflict driven approach where we build complex systems to keep people on one side of a wall doing things that we approve of not doing other things we are actually

building a very beautiful complex video game for trolls so the more energy the more lines in GD DS and the more lines of code we write to try and block a behavior proactively you know beforehand I kind of feel like that's the struggle we're in so it almost feels like we need a completely new way to think about it other than sort of the tools you were talking about which are what we have and have developed to date so I don't know that there's a question so much as has there been any thinking in terms of completely new ways of thinking about it for example when you're welcoming someone into their very first VR experience when we go out on the street we know there are certain risks we take we know there are police about like we kind of know the rules of that world I almost feel like there's an element like you said of getting the message out hey this might happen I feel like we need sort of completely new like modes of thought around it you have any comments or pointers or anything we can use oh hello yeah it's it's heck and its

heck and rough like that's that's not that's no joke and and it is and again like you don't want to have to build for the harasser right you don't want to build for the lowest common denominator of people were gonna be rude to each other I have seen some other experiments that and things that people are doing I know alt space I believe high fidelity does as well has greeters like people who will meet you for like they have a great team of volunteers and they sort of leverage the community to sort of like and they give them that responsibility so like in terms of giving your community sort of agency and responsibility to sort of like make that community and reinforce those norms themselves they do this in the form of greeters who like show be like hello welcome are you having problems let me try and help you figure out here are some cool things that you can do and leveraging that has been really useful again I'm really into actually pre-emptive sort of experiments in terms of allowing players to sort of customize the social experience that they would like to have before they even reach into it yes people are talking about it but it

were still in a super experimental phase I want to remind you also of the video that we had the video that we showed previously of the YouTube experience in that experience they the other people who are in that room with you are on the dock in front of you and it leaves very limited room for abuse so a lot of think the categories of abuse that side brought up are simply impossible you know bodily and environmental abuse they're impossible and this was a design decision that came from considering abuse from day one and this is exactly what we're talking about when we say you need to consider abuse from the beginning design it into it this is like no one's going to arrive at that solution by first starting with full six off head and hands you know traditional VR VR to be our experiences you have to like that experience was was born out of like criteria one make a create a situation where abuse is

basically impossible and there's needs to be a lot more creativity around that space thank you very much for your enlightening talk I really appreciate it I feel that there's a lot to learn so just following up on that train of thought of having consequences or not letting abuse occur doesn't that restrict freedom as well for example right now I could go up to anyone and do weird gestures like I'm not restricted to do that but right now and we are so far it seems like you're trying to restrict that so instead why not create identity like punishments I don't know if you've used steam a lot but there's a back ban and a vac ban is usually if you've used cheats or have been hacking in games and everybody kind of knows oh this guy's a cheater so is there like a global identity that's being worked on for VR

games shared across experiences or because there's Facebook Google and its team and creates a weird issue of how to keep track of all of that yeah I know that does not currently exist it would be incredibly interesting so that like if I went into annex so I spent a lot of time in rec room if I went to high fidelity and I was being a big old jerk because that's not where I usually hang out so there are minimal consequences but they went back to rec room and that reputation followed me maybe I wouldn't go to other social experiences and be a big old jerk but that hasn't been talked about right now that's really hard and you're talking about a lot of teams across and various companies working together on this on this one this one project it'd be interesting I would really like to see something like that experimented with but yeah I mean my experience was in the VRS alt room I think and it was funny but ridiculous when a guy came up to me and just started yelling in my face just Televisa Mike it was the most jarring experience

so it's way worse than let's say playing a video game online and then having people yelling chat 100% yep but thank you very much thank you right this is also for psy you guys have opinions but abuse feel free to just have opinions and so thanks for that talk I hadn't thought about the way that I kind of synthesized it in my mind is that you mentioned your you as a woman online or harassed in a variety of media and now The Closer virtual reality gets to real reality the more we can have this like terrible perfect storm of the frequency of online harassment with the impact of in-person harassment which is like a real bad problem and so that that got me thinking about like why is like maybe I'm wrong about this but I would think that real-world harassment might be less frequent or like it's obviously

they're both huge problems but like there might be less frequency because of like a social contract or the permanence of consequences of someone like knowing you know I mean like I thought you can there's cops there's authorities there's like your identity is tied to your like physical presence right mm-hmm I'm wondering if anyone's kind of broken down sociologically like what that physical real world social contract is based on and whether we can have like a super version of it and VR I yeah yeah I spend a lot of time late at night thinking about the stuff because of course I'm gonna think about stuff like that um it is different it's sort of in the real world we have the thought of actual consequences happening to an actual person in virtual in any online environment they're sort of like a divide between the actual person and how they're represented online so consequences don't feel quite like they apply to people yeah ultimately the idea

would be how do we sort of reinforce that and and bring sort of those structures that exist in the real world into VR a lot of it's actually social a lot of it actually is you know fear of getting caught it's fear of peers and not accepting this there like so one of the things that we've seen in a lot of our VR - VR experiments with daydream labs is that because the avatars that we tend to use are very sparse literally just a floating head and there's our we have a different physical relationship with that that other avatar the other person's avatar and I have seen it over and over again people completely innocuously go into their first VR to VR experience and they'll say Oh what does it feel like when I stand inside your body and I mean you might laugh but this is this is super common for first time via our users if you don't do something to create a negative experience around that and it's completely innocent it's just like well I've never been able to have this experience before what does it look like I do see my head clipping through where

does it start to disappear it doesn't this just like engineers who are just like what are the physical limitations like they're just they're just querying the like the physics of that space right but if the person on the other side isn't ready for that it's an incredibly basic invasive and so it is we it is going to be more common unless we do something about it people do have a different connection to their body than they do to their avatar cool thank you thank you hi I'm Andrew from Apple and this is kind of a question kind of a comment I have children who I like to spend time with my children obviously I like to spend time with in VR and I like to introduce them into new VR experiences but introducing someone into a VR experience is kind of like debugging a software problem over the phone like you really have just kind of there's no direct agency there to really help them through the experience and I would love to introduce my kids to rec

room but I'm too worried about you know just being able to say all right like back off there's like a someone along with me that can help me through the experience and what I'm getting to at is should there be a mechanism to be able to both considering abuse and synchronous experiences to be able to guide someone to be able to ride along with someone in VR and in some ways to to reach out directly and affect or improve their experiences is this something that you've considered oh yeah I mean 100% like this is this is something that I would love to see experiments with especially this kind of falls into a lot of my and I didn't get to expand on more but about the idea of for people who aren't immediately harassed for example you know one of these might be you know if you're in with your kids and somebody starts harassing your kids and you're with them like how do you as a parent sort of take charge of that situation and protect your kids these are some of the things that we need a whole lot of experimentation with asynchrony you have that yeah I mean

Daniel hinted at this you know when we added the mirror window to to Google Earth everyone was sort of able to follow along but there was a has been a lot of discussion about well what if I can point to a place and draw your attention there and for a rec room you can imagine if you want to be that chaperone for your child what if you have the block controls available for every avatar right from that mirror window and those are exactly the types of asynchronous experiences I'm sorry the asymmetric experiences that we would love to see more of you know what if you can your child can be in a daydream phone but you can be following right alongside on your phone and have a you know a mirror a mirror view of what they're seeing here but then some controls to control their experience on the other side of your screen yeah right these are fantastic oh so yeah I think a similar example is the storybook example that we showed where again it's directly bringing our kid into a VR experience which the the book we chose is slightly frightening book for children and the idea being that you can see where the kid is looking you can

see what they're focused on so if they do get scared it's pretty easy to talk with them to pull them out to take them back to navigate them through the space cool all right thank you thank you that's great ideas and that's the sort of stuff I'd love to see people experiment with and try and see what works reminding everyone of course that VR is currently for thirteen years old and up yes 13 years of age innit so when you're reading stories to your 13 year old right as one does hi so firstly Rob I've played extra solo and it's great so in fact day I first saw it here at Cato met four years ago I think it was under the question so I've done a lot of thinking about the asynchronous sort of player in VR as well more from the side of like cooperative or competitive gaming so you could have a VR player and then ideas to a player with a keyboard a mouse above the shooter maybe there's people that are on the ground and then people that are flying around so or maybe someones

like on a phone and they're like doing the tower defense and they're placing things and the guy being way out which is more of a dry land movement cause what I do everything so is there any sort of things you thought about in like cooperative competitive multiplayer in asynchronous leave that is what's the question should you be doing more of that stuff hang on I have a slide for that yes yeah experiment awesome thank you I'd love to see your work all right we'll do that have you guys like done anything with that or any any like prototyping or looking into anything specific do you have a slide for that too we we have some pretty goofy I mean we actually took one of the slides out with some of our really really goofy sort of asymmetric games because they were terrible sometimes you have to go it down a lot of dead ends to find good stuff the lessons that we learn is some of that process is that asymmetric

experience is great but how do you make the players on both sides feel equally engaged in the experience how do you balance that balance balance becomes really hard across devices and interfaces I mean already in many cases like but they don't let the console players play against the desktop players because it doesn't seem balanced so when you're talking about completely different interfaces and viewpoints that gets to be an even harder question right okay just a slightly different question as well so Google Earth VR seems likely to be a perfect platform for more like social experiences as well so there's anything you're doing taking in that direction I mean I know we have a ton of G+ users out there right so I honestly it's it's tough figuring out who's gonna win the social space and whether we should you know you walk into Facebook and whether you have persistence identities honestly Google hasn't delved a whole lot into that space that much right okay one final question is a little bit

off-topic but if you thought about opening up Google Earth VR as a platform for other developers to build experiences on come talk to me afterwards okay we have one more minute but give me question and when you're I'll be real quick so I hadn't experienced recently regarding abuse where a female co-worker and I were in a game for a few seconds and we were people were grabbing at us like crazy and yeah but just as I was about to start telling them off they started talking about what they were doing and the short version is they didn't feel that anybody has a right to any kind of bodily integrity in a virtual space and that it shouldn't matter unless they're abusing people in real life after practicing it in VR basically well that's certainly an opinion yeah so I was just wondering if you had any experience encountering that particular perspective and how best to speak to it and in just waiting people from behaving that way yeah I totally absolutely have had that experience it is an opinion I think that's probably why people I think

that's the root of it right I think that's what people are abusing to begin with the people who are engaging in those sorts of behaviors generally would not do so in real life and again it comes from this idea that the avatars body is not your own body it's not a real body it doesn't count it's it's not real if you don't like it why not you just get our VR which I refuse to believe that VR is for the people who are harassing people just as a standard baseline it's really hard to combat a lot of this has to do again honestly I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that VR is still so new and that the experiences with VR still so new and a lot of people are equated VR is more similar to video games and not making sort of that divide of like know the avatars body is my own body it represents where I am and when you enact in that behavior to my perspective it is happening to me in my body I sense of proprioception of where my body is and it is exactly where you're grabbing and that's heck and gross so I'm hoping in some ways I'm an optimist

generally so I'm hoping that as VR becomes more prevalent and prolific that people start understanding and have more empathy in terms of what that experience is like for others does it help last one can we do one more son can so speaking of having your own body in VR what do you think of motion capturing of your body in VR instead of just moving a controller and politically moving stuff around in in VR do you think that there's a potential market in there or okay and the line between mocap you know it's funny we have like working with academic systems in the past oftentimes we have these like 150 thousand dollars vikon motion capture systems and now all of a sudden you can buy your $600 five and it does like

almost as much like sure all you have is head and hands but you can sort of guess the rest of your body and do a pretty good job what I'll definitely say about mocap is that that animation system that we showed in one of the videos the really dark video that Daniel was showing the the life that you breathe into everything that you touch through your motion feels incredible like it really but it really feels like you're giving life to those spaces and so there's I there's I don't know quite how to answer the questions but there's definitely I feel like we've just made mocap really easy and it's gonna be a wonderful thing and we need more people to understand and explore the implications of where that's going to go right all right thank you as Rob touched on I think anything you can do to make the experience feel more human you know hands and head are great but anything you could do is a yes hopes not only with the experience but helps with what the previous questioner asked about

which is how can we make people feel more like people not just avatars that we mitigate abuse through them right thank you I want everyone to run an experiment right if you're if you're experiencing a lot of abuse deliberately recalibrate your floor so that you're six inches taller than everybody else and see weather changes I don't know what it'll do but I want people to do this and then report back to me yeah you can tweet at us see those are our names tweeted us your your your results I'm really curious and I think that's it thank you everybody thanks everybody for coming [Applause]