Recently, a woman who is the vice president of a company working on the metaverse revealed that she was abused both verbally and physically by three men on the platform just minutes after Meta entered the Horizon Venues metaverse universe. Before that, another woman working in the beta version of the platform said that she was harassed in a similar way; Security questions about the metaverse, which even those who built the system could not grasp what it meant for humanity, had increased.
After these scandalous events, Meta added a new feature to the system against virtual harassment. The company, which wants to stop such events, announced that the ‘personal limit’ system has been added to the avatars in Horizon.
Virtual personal space feature will be the ‘default’ feature of the system
Avatars on the platform already had a feature that allowed you to raise your hand and say ‘stop’ when another avatar got too close to you; However, the events have proven that this feature alone is unfortunately not enough. With the new feature, which will exist in a ‘default’ way from Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues platforms, it will now be possible for avatars to prevent other people from approaching them by creating an invisible virtual barrier around them.
60 cm security straps
According to the statement from Meta, the feature in which a virtual personal space radius of approximately 60 cm is given to each avatar; means there will be about 1.2 meters distance between avatars. For the system, which aims to establish standard norms for how people interact in a virtual reality environment, Meta spokesperson Kristina Milian states that users cannot disable personal limits. Of course, with the changes to be made in the future, it may be possible for people to customize their distance from other avatars as they wish.
According to the new feature, when an avatar tries to walk or teleport into your personal space, this movement of the avatar will be stopped by the virtual personal space bubble that contains your avatar. In contrast, Millian states that a user can still walk past another user and that virtual personal space balloons cannot be used for ‘pranks’ such as blocking entrances.
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