With an aim to stop sexual harassment in the virtual reality space, social network giant Meta has unveiled a 'Personal Boundary' feature for its Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues virtual reality (VR) systems that will prevent avatars from coming within a set distance of each other.
The new feature comes two months after Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social space and world-building game by Facebook-owner Meta, opened to the public after a long period of beta testing. During beta testing in December, one user had complained that her avatar had been groped by another Horizon Worlds user. The incident illustrated the difficulty of moderating the virtual reality space. Finally, the user engaged the block feature to stop the harasser.
The feature, which will create a four-foot distance between avatars, will help in avoiding unwanted interactions. However, users will still be allowed to stretch their arms to give another avatar a fist-bump or a high five, The Verge reported.
The system will halt the movement of avatars by default if they try to walk or teleport into the Personal Boundary of others.
Meta already has a harassment feature in which a user’s hands can disappear if they come too close to another avatar. The boundary system builds on this existing feature.
As the system intends to set up standard norms for how people interact in the virtual reality space, users will not be allowed to disable their personal boundaries, The Verge quoted Meta spokesperson Kristina Milian as saying. However, in the future, users may be allowed to customise the size of the radius.
"Over time, we'll continue to make improvements as we learn how this affects people's experiences," IANS quoted Horizon vice-president Vivek Sharma as saying in a blog post late on Friday.
According to Sharma, the new feature will help set behavioural norms in VR, which is important for the relatively new medium.
