Horizon Worlds, the social virtual reality platform of Meta (Facebook), gets a facelift “Personal Boundaries” to help stop virtual fumbling after the app’s beta testers were harassed.
The personal boundary is a four-foot barrier between avatars designed to be always on by default. While the concept image depicts a bubble, the actual boundary will be invisible in Worlds.
Credit: Meta
What happens if someone tries to cross the border? the the system will stop the forward movement, Horizon Vice President Vivek Sharma explained in a blog post. There will also be no haptic feedback in these situations, meaning the user won’t feel like they’ve touched anything.
Last December, a beta tester describes being groped by a stranger in a Horizon group on Facebook. “Sexual harassment is no joke on the internet, but being in virtual reality adds another layer that makes the event more intense,” she wrote.
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Sharma described the incident as “absolutely unfortunate” and said the tester didn’t use the security features already built into Horizon Worlds. “It’s always good feedback for us because I want to do [the blocking feature] trivially easy and findable,” he said The edge at the time.
Presumably, Personal Boundary is Meta’s way of putting its security features to the fore. Whether that will actually stop harassment in space remains to be seen.
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