tl;dr: VR users can be watched without knowing, and they can also record bystanders. Vice VRsa alerts VR users when people are nearby and alerts bystanders if the VR user is recording.
The immersive experience of Virtual Reality (VR) disconnects VR users from their physical surroundings, subjecting them to surveillance from bystanders who could record conversations without consent. While recent research has sought to mitigate this risk (e.g., VR users can stream a live view of their surrounding area into VR), it does not address that bystanders are conversely being recorded by the VR stream without their knowledge. This creates a causality dilemma where the VR user’s privacy-enhancing activities raise the bystander’s privacy concerns. We introduce Vice VRsa, a system that provides awareness of bystander presence to VR users as well as a VR user’s monitoring status to bystanders. This work seeks to provide a concept and set of interactions for considering mutual awareness and privacy for both VR users and bystanders. Results from preliminary interviews with VR experts suggest factors for privacy implications in designing VR interactions in public physical spaces.