Actual Conversations for the Virtual World

Abstract

AbstractWith the inevitable emergence of virtual reality and all the hype around metaverses, a slew of apps and virtual experiences attempted to make use of its new medium’s untapped potential. Most of these virtual reality apps are attempting to be an exact copy of a real-world experience for virtual reality. From a design standpoint, this seems like low-hanging fruit for two reasons. A. It is impossible to translate all the multi-sensory data we receive from real-world experiences, into the virtual world. B. Virtual reality itself has some capabilities that are not possible in the real world. For these two reasons any attempt to simply copy something from the real world without re-thinking its design principles turns out to be a hollow shell of its real-world origins. For my thesis research, I picked conversations as one example of this kind of real-world mimicry. My goal is to find design paths to suggest a better use of virtual reality-specific capabilities and strip away real-world specific requirements to make a better conversational experience for virtual reality. I started learning about conversations and how we conduct them in psychology and sociology literature to achieve this. And at the same time, I spend time in metaverse casually talking to people and observing behaviors and interactions. This initial research phase helped me narrow down my general topic of conversation to initiation of a conversation since I observed that as soon as people start to talk to each other things get easier and smoother, whether it's in the real world or virtual reality.