But there’s already one problem that some users have reported cropping up in the nascent space: harassment and other unwanted behavior, particularly in social VR apps and games, including in Horizon Worlds.
It’s hard to tell how widespread VR harassment is, but a December report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate gives a sense of its prevalence in VRChat.
In hopes of stopping and preventing bad behavior, social VR apps tend to offer a number of common tools that people can use.
There aren’t established normsAn overarching challenge in addressing VR harassment is the lack of agreement over what even counts as harassment in a virtual space versus a physical one.
“Because it’s immersive, the embodied feature of social VR, those behaviors kind of feel realistic, which means it could feel damaging because it feels physical, the threat,” Freeman said.