Towards a Taxonomy of Social VR Application Design

The number of social VR applications-or applications that support social interaction between users in virtual reality-has grown considerably in recent years. A consequence of this growth is that the state of social VR application design has become increasingly obfuscated, which complicates identification of design trends, best practices, and uncommon features that are perhaps worthy of wider adoption. To help address this problem, this paper presents a taxonomy of social VR application design choices as informed by 29 commercial and prototypical applications in the literature. Discussion of the taxonomy highlights novel features of research prototypes that could potentially enrich the social experience in commercially available applications. The paper concludes by considering how the taxonomy can guide future design of social VR applications, and next steps for refining the taxonomy.