Designing Privacy for Collaborative Music Making in Virtual Reality
Liang Men, Danqi Zhao · 2021
Privacy is needed to schedule personal activities and social interaction, and to prepare and create wonderful things before confidently sharing with others. How to build privacy in virtual reality remains an open question, though it is potentially as important as it is in reality. This paper presents two studies to build privacy in VR with a focus on providing sonic privacy to aid collaborative music making (CMM). The first study uses soundproof walls to provide sonic privacy, the second study applies augmented sound attenuation as a way to produce sonic privacy to aid collaborative music making. Results show privacy is needed and both ways can produce sonic privacy. Privacy provided in the first study is binary and discrete, whilst privacy provided in the latter is continuous, step-less and adjustable. By comparing and discussing between these two approaches, we propose a methodological approach to build privacy to aid collaboration in shared virtual reality. In particular, three channels for building privacy have been identified and three implications have been proposed for designing privacy for collaborative tasks in shared virtual environments, collaborative music making in particular.