The Spacebar

- Problems & Opportunities

Our behaviors of flirting change with the venues, occasions, and mediums. How we act on zoom dating is much different from when we are at a bar, and this makes me curious that how will flirting in virtual reality(VR) be like?

Many people start to meet each other on several social VR platforms, but almost none of them are designed exclusively for dating or flirting. Moreover, many of these applications are not age-restricted, making it hard to share sexy conversations there. When I observed and interviewed users in the applications, they complained about the harassment and toxic behaviors. Most of the safety systems in those applications are poorly built, making it hard to block or report other users. Gradually, users feel less secured and less willing to try social VR applications.

As a designer, I wonder,

- Making

First, I sketched out the whole application structure by user flows. Through it, I got a better understanding of how users will experience this application. First, user will go over an onboarding session, and then explore the environment and talk to people, when they get closer, the users can chat offline if there is a possibility.

Part of the user flows of features

- Friend Level

For the safety issue, I was inspired by Edward T. Hall's zones of interpersonal space and Michelle Cortese's speech on Harassment in VR, and developed a social structure called "Friend Level". Friend Level simulates the natural friendship development in a digital space. In the level, people's relationship are sorted into three level: strangers, friends, and meteors. When people first meet each other, their relationship will start from stranger level. The status will change when both of the them agree to bring their relationship to next level. Some of the features are only available after reaching certain friendship level, just like in real life, we are allowed to do some interaction only after we are familiar with each other enough.

- User Journey

Onboarding