A Surprise Birthday Party in VR: Leveraging Social Virtual Reality to Maintain Existing Close Ties over Distance

Abstract

This paper explores how social virtual reality, a novel 3D virtual social interaction space that provides embodied and immersive experiences, can be leveraged to maintain existing close interpersonal relationships over distance. Based on 672 Reddit posts and comments, our findings show that in addition to initiating and building new relationships with online strangers, social VR platforms’ unique features, including physicality, the enhanced sense of presence, and the broad range of shared embodied activities, can also help maintain various types of established close ties (e.g., parent-child, friends, siblings, and romantic partners) over distance in a nuanced way. This work contributes to understanding the increasingly important role of social VR in innovating modern computer-mediated relationships and can inform the future design of social VR to better support people’s social needs and interpersonal connections.