The Case for Weird Social in VR/XR

Abstract

COVID underscores the potential of VR meeting tools to compensate for lack of embodied communication in applications like Zoom. But both research and commercial VR meeting environments typically seek to approximate physical meetings, instead of exploring new capacities of communication and coordination. We argue the most transformative features of VR (and XR more broadly) may look and feel very different from familiar social rituals of physical meetings. Embracing "weird"forms of sociality and embodiment, we incorporate inspiration from a range of sources including: (1) emerging rituals in commercial social VR, (2) existing research on social augmentation systems for meetings, (3) novel examples of embodied VR communication, and (4) a fictionalized vignette envisioning a future with aspects of "Weird Social XR"folded into everyday life. We call upon the research community to approach these speculative forms of alien sociality as opportunities to explore new kinds of social superpowers.