User studies improve understanding of VR motion privacy acceptance
Why User Studies and Participant Experience Reporting Matter for VR Motion Privacy?
Human-Computer InteractionCryptography and Security
Summary
People playing VR games sometimes share their movement data on public leaderboards, which can put their privacy at risk. The authors studied three ways to change these movements to protect privacy and measured how much people liked them. They found that directly asking users what they think explains acceptance better than just measuring physical changes. Also, people who had more VR experience or saw privacy protections before were more likely to accept these changes. They suggest that both user opinions and physical measures should be used together when evaluating VR privacy tools.
What this means in practice
- •For vr game developers: Design VR game features that balance motion privacy protection with player acceptance by combining physical measures and user feedback.
- •For vr hardware designers: Incorporate user experience data when evaluating motion privacy mechanisms to improve user comfort and acceptance in VR devices.
Authors
Azim Ibragimov, Eric D. Ragan
Abstract
Public VR game leaderboards contain tracked motion recordings uploaded by hundreds of thousands of users. Once uploaded, these recordings are accessible to anyone and create privacy risks (i.e., identification and profiling). Prior work has proposed mechanisms that modify tracked movement to reduce these risks. Their utility is commonly evaluated through physical deviation, where smaller deviations indicate better utility, while user studies are less common. However, it remains unclear how well physical deviation explains users' acceptance of a mechanism compared to user studies. We examine this through a user study of three VR motion privacy mechanisms at five physical deviation levels. We find that user studies explain substantially more variation in mechanism acceptance than physical deviation, although physical deviation remains significant. We also find that prior VR experience and exposure to VR privacy mechanisms significantly affect acceptance. We recommend combining physical deviation with user studies and reporting participants' prior experience.