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Browsing by Author "Deldari, Elmira"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    A Diary Study in Social Virtual Reality: Impact of Avatars with Disability Signifiers on the Social Experiences of People with Disabilities
    Zhang, Kexin; Deldari, Elmira; Yao, Yaxing; Zhao, Yuhang (ACM, 2023-10-22)
    People with disabilities (PWD) have shown a growing presence in the emerging social virtual reality (VR). To support disability representation, some social VR platforms start to involve disability features in avatar design. However, it is unclear how disability disclosure via avatars (and the way to present it)would afect PWD’s social experiences and interaction dynamics with others. To fll this gap, we conducted a diary study with 10 PWD who freely explored VRChat—a popular commercial social VR platform—for two weeks, comparing their experiences between using regular avatars and avatars with disability signifers (i.e., avatar features that indicate the user’s disability in real life). We found that PWD preferred using avatars with disability signifers and wanted to further enhance their aesthetics and interactivity. However, such avatars also caused embodied, explicit harassment targeting PWD. We revealed the unique factors that led to such harassment and derived design implications and protection mechanisms to inspire more safe and inclusive social VR.
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    An investigation of teenager experiences in social virtual reality from teenagers', parents', and bystanders' perspectives
    Deldari, Elmira; Poveda, Julio; Freed, Diana; Yao, Yaxing (2023)
    The recent rise of social virtual reality (VR) platforms has introduced new technology characteristics and user experiences, which may lead to new forms of online harassment, particularly among teenagers (aged 13-17). In this paper, we took a multi-stakeholder approach and investigate teenagers’ experiences and safety threats in social VR from three perspectives (teenagers, parents, and bystanders) to cover complementary perspectives. Through an interview study with 24 participants (8 teenagers, 7 parents, and 9 bystanders), we found several safety threats that teenagers may face, such as virtual grooming, ability-based discrimination, unforeseeable threats in privacy rooms, etc. We highlight new forms of harassment in the social VR context, such as erotic role-play and abuse through phantom sense, as well as the discrepancies among teenagers, parents, and bystanders regarding their perceptions of such threats. We draw design implications to better support safer social VR environments for teenagers.
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    Users' Perceptions of Online Child Abuse Detection Mechanisms
    Deldari, Elmira; Thakkar, Parth; Yao, Yaxing (ACM, 2024-04-23)
    Child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) online has become a major safety issue for children to access the Internet. To combat CSEA, electronics services providers (ESP) have implemented various mechanisms to detect child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). However, these mechanisms, despite their capability to prevent the mass distribution of CSAM online, may raise significant privacy concerns among general users. In this paper, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 23 participants to understand their privacy perceptions of two types of online CSAM detection mechanisms. Our results suggested that users were concerned about the transparency of the detection process, inappropriate access to users' data, and unclear boundaries of such mechanisms. Our results also highlight that, even though the majority of participants choose to sacrifice their privacy for societal benefits, they still have privacy concerns that need to be addressed. We discuss the design and policy implications for ESP to improve users' awareness of the data practices of these mechanisms, alleviate users' privacy concerns, and increase societal benefits.