Meta has unveiled a ‘personal boundary’ feature for its Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues virtual reality (VR) systems that will prevent avatars in the metaverse from coming within a set distance of each other. This is intended to help users avoid unwanted interactions and harassment. This update comes after complaints emerged in news reports and in social media of incidents of sexual harassment.
According to Horizon Vice President Vivek Sharma, personal boundary will by default make it feel like there is an almost 4-foot distance between your avatar and others.
Within 60 seconds of joining — I was verbally and sexually harassed,” one user wrote in a blog of her experience. “A horrible experience that happened so fast and before I could even think about putting the safety barrier in place. I froze,” she added pointing out that several male avatars had gangraped her digital avatar on the platform.
For the uninitiated, Facebook rebranded itself Meta last year to build a virtual universe blurring the lines between the physical world and the digital one. Metaverse is supposed to be a “digital world” with real people represented by digital objects.
With the new feature in place, if an avatar tries to enter your personal boundary, the system will halt their forward movement as they reach the boundary. “This builds upon our existing hand harassment measures that are already in place, where an avatar’s hands would disappear if they encroached upon someone’s personal space,” Sharma wrote in a blog post.
Personal Boundary feature, by default will be always on, “this will help to set behavioural norms—and that’s important for a relatively new medium like VR,” Sharma added, pointing that in the near future, the company will explore the possibility of adding in new controls and UI changes, like letting people customise the size of their personal boundary.
We believe Personal Boundary is a powerful example of how VR has the potential to help people interact comfortably. It’s an important step, and there’s still much more work to be done. We’ll continue to test and explore new ways to help people feel comfortable in VR.”
Horizon Workrooms is a first step toward a VR “metaverse”. Mark Zuckerberg’s plan is to jump straight from smartphones and laptops to VR headsets as the way to engage billions of its users with Facebook in a more immersive manner. Meta opened its Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform to the public in North America in December, in a step toward building its metaverse vision for the future.
