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Immersive Dating: A Qualitative Investigation of Romantic Interaction in Virtual RealityAuthor: Tejaswini Yeleswarapu Date: 2021-05-29 Report no: IIIT/TH/2021/60 Advisor:Nimmi Rangaswamy AbstractThe evolution of dating technologies from matchmaking only services to dating technology ‘mediums’ has brought tremendous shifts to both dating paradigms as well as dating cultures over the years. Personal ads encouraged the shift in the agency to choose partners from family to individuals and computer dating in the 60s and 70s played a hand in challenging traditional norms of limiting oneself to one partner and only from within one’s social class. These dating technologies, however, only served as matchmaking services leaving all the actual preliminary ‘dating’ or ‘gauging’ to in-person, FtF (face to face) meetings. The launch of online dating through Match.com transformed dating experiences by bringing both matchmaking and preliminary dating under one umbrella, enabling finding and gauging matches as potential partners through chat on the same medium. From newspaper ads to VHS tapes, Match.com, and now Tinder, the aim of dating technologies has remained the same - to gauge potential dates that could spark a good real-life date. In the meanwhile, fully immersive VR has evolved as a powerful, embedded, and immersive technology medium to transform dating experiences once again. While existing chat-based dating mediums like Tinder claimed the benefits of internet technologies going mobile, fully immersive VR displaces mobility in favour of bodily immersion. Each dating technology provides different mechanisms to ‘gauge’ matches depending on its affordances with online dating web and mobile apps already thoroughly explored by existing literature. However, there is no rigorous research examining ‘dating’ or romantic interaction in VR, despite social interaction being a serious topic of exploration in the HCI community. This thesis aims to push the discourse on social interaction a step further by analyzing the dynamics of romantic reciprocality in a fully immersive VR application. Through a qualitative study, the first few chapters of the thesis examine a customizable social VR application ‘RecRoom’ as a dating technology medium to analyze how dimensions of interaction - including but not limited to voice, haptics, and spatiality - influence the dynamics of dating experiences. Tinder is employed as a contrasting chat-based medium to situate and deepen our learnings about dating in VR. The principal finding from our research is fully immersive VR allows for better, efficient, and effective ‘gauging’ of matches resulting in well-informed decisions to meet (or not) virtual partners in real life than existing chat-based mediums like Tinder. We base this conclusion on a combination of factors such as environmental alleviation of pressure, spontaneity, real-time interaction, better avenues of attraction leading to improved gauging of matches, and experience of first dates. However, the very aspects of fully immersive VR that make it a better medium to gauge matches open the floodgates to ethically mixed experiences - with online harassment taking a new form and inflicting genuine harm. The penultimate chapter endeavors to close the thesis by outlining the negative aspects of fully immersive VR, particularly harassment and raises the crucial need for the revision of ethical norms governing human- VR interactions. The goal of this chapter is to highlight the ethical implications of a medium capable of affording full bodily immersion, encouraging informed and responsible development of future VR dating apps. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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