Recently, a woman in the UK wrote a detailed blog post about how she experienced sexual harassment in the virtual game Horizon Worlds developed by Meta, formerly known as Facebook. Meta took it very seriously and introduced the ”Personal Boundary’ feature that ensures a minimum distance between users’ avatars in its virtual world.
Nina Jane Patel, a 43-year-old British woman, claims that she was verbally and sexually harassed by 3–4 male avatars. It was like virtual gang rape.
After this news was picked by several news portals, developers at Meta worked on adding the Personal Boundary. This feature is now being rolled out for Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. It will add an almost 4-foot distance between your avatar and others. If an avatar’s hands encroach upon someone’s personal space, hands would disappear. This will be enabled by default. The company promises to explore the possibility of adding in new controls and UI changes to let people control the size of their Personal Boundary.
‘We believe Personal Boundary is a powerful example of how VR has the potential to help people interact comfortably. It’s an important step, and there’s still much more work to be done,’ said Vivek Sharma, Vice President, Horizon.
Meta opened its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds to the public in North America back in December. This platform was another step towards building its metaverse for the future. Metaverse is an interesting concept and has received mixed reactions from users across the globe. It lets VR headset-wearing users in meeting with friends and play games together in a virtual world. You need to be 18 years older and have the proper equipment to experience the virtual world.
It wasn’t the first time a user complained about sexual harassment in the virtual world. In 2016, a gamer, Jordan Belamire, also wrote a similar article about virtual groping in a game called QuiVr. Now when this incident is again in limelight, all the companies that are working in VR and Metaverse space should take this seriously.
