Investigating Guardian Awareness Techniques to Promote Safety in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) can completely immerse users in a virtual world and provide little awareness of bystanders in the surrounding physical environment. Current technologies use predefined guardian area visualizations to set safety boundaries for VR interactions. However, bystanders cannot perceive these boundaries and may collide with VR users if they accidentally enter guardian areas. In this paper, we investigate four awareness techniques on mobile phones and smartwatches to help bystanders avoid invading guardian areas. These techniques include augmented reality boundary overlays and visual, auditory, and haptic alerts indicating bystanders' distance from guardians. Our findings suggest that the proposed techniques effectively keep participants clear of the safety boundaries. More specifically, using augmented reality overlays, participants could avoid guardians with less time, and haptic alerts caused less distraction.