The big issues

Through our collective practice-led research, Designing Audience-centric VR will focus on shaping responsible and thought-provoking digital futures and digital innovation. In this project we will address the following key immersive industry challenges: 

1. Social Isolation in Virtual Reality (VR): VR experiences are usually solitary, potentially alienating participants from their community, while the model of online social VR still struggles to safeguard the participants’ interactions. 
2. Poor Onboarding Practices: Popular commercial and cultural immersive experiences often struggle to successfully onboard participants, leading to unpleasant and potentially harmful experiences. 
3. Diversity Gap in Immersive Arts: StoryFutures' 2021 report highlights a lack of diversity (73% VR users are young white men), mirrored by the government's 2022-23 Participation Survey showing an 11% arts engagement gap between white and BAME audiences. This gap can lead to irrelevant, misinformed, or uncomfortable experiences for diverse audiences. 
4. Data Privacy and User Awareness: A 2022 study found user concerns about biometric data sharing (50% worried, 20% feared misuse, 60% unaware of third-party sharing). 

Our response

Through research, iterative design and development and targeted user feedback, ‘Designing Audience-centric VR’ will explore inclusive approaches to audience experience design for Virtual and Extended Reality (VR and XR). 

• Social Isolation in VR: 
  We will develop multi-person XR prototypes that test different ways for audience-participants to collaborate with VR-participants and influence the VR content using a combination of realtime projection, reactive content, hand tracking and biometric sensors. 

We aim to create a sense of collaboration, shared experience and agency between VR-participants and audience-participants, and to explore their group dynamics. 

• Poor Onboarding Practices & Diversity Gap in Immersive Arts: 
  We aim to better understand the amount of information necessary for different audiences in order to create a safe and engaging onboarding experience without revealing too much of the experience. We will focus on how the onboarding becomes part of the performance-experience itself, exploring different methods including, how to contextually integrate safeguarding practices and interactivity tutorials into the experience. 
   
  We will invite a diverse range of participants to test our prototypes and onboarding practices, targeting participants who are not normally represented or may face barriers to inclusion in immersive work. 
  
  
• Data Privacy and User Awareness: 
  We will facilitate transparent, honest and thought-provoking discussions around data sharing and manipulation.