Dissecting User Experience of Social Virtual Reality: A Tale of Five Platforms
Author(s)
Cheng, Ruizhi
Li, Jie
Chen, Songqing
Han, Bo
Date Issued
October 16, 2025
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Ruizhi Cheng, Jie Li, Songqing Chen, and Bo Han. 2025. Dissecting User Experience of Social Virtual Reality: A Tale of Five Platforms. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 7, Article CSCW224 (November 2025), 31 pages.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Social virtual reality (VR) has the potential to replace conventional online social media by offering quasi-realworld social experiences. As such, it has been extensively examined by the research community. However,
existing studies fall short of providing a comprehensive understanding of how different aspects of social
VR platforms interact to affect user experience. Motivated by this limitation, we conduct a user study with
Oculus Quest 2 headsets and dissect the user experience on five social VR platforms. We evenly and randomly
divide 42 participants into short-term (spending 10–30 minutes/platform) and long-term (spending at least
120 minutes/platform) groups. Besides employing surveys and interviews, we measure the frame rate and
resolution of these platforms and explore how various factors interplay to influence the user experience of
social VR. Our findings reveal that the frame rate, resolution, and interactive events of social VR platforms
have a more significant impact on the experience of long-term users compared to short-term users. The
scalability limitations of these platforms, as evidenced by decreased frame rates with the increasing number
of concurrent users, result in an increased prevalence of motion sickness among long-term users, negatively
impacting their overall experience. Moreover, the absence of highly interactive events also deteriorates their
overall experience, and the low resolution combined with the lack of interactive events further decreases their
sense of social presence. Additionally, our study demonstrates several common limitations negatively affecting
the experience of both long-term and short-term users. For example, the harassment prevention mechanisms
on all five platforms are inadequate, and being harassed has a detrimental effect on users’ overall experience
and sense of social presence. The avatar embodiment of investigated platforms has limited contribution to
users’ sense of social presence, mainly due to the lack of realism and full-body tracking. Our findings call for
more research in scalability support, motion sickness relief, interactive event design, harassment prevention,
and avatar development for improving social VR platforms in the future.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3757405
