A Design Framework for Social Virtual Reality Experiences: Exploring Social and Cultural Dimensions for Meaningful and Impactful VR

Virtual Reality has often been described as providing a means to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” offering powerful interventions for experiential learning. Such experiences can, for example, provide a safe and controlled means of engaging with often difficult, unsafe or emotionally charged situations. Crucial to this experience is the sense of presence, informed by place and plausibility, of the simulation design. However, past studies often create such experiences through the lens of the developer, and they may therefore lack the authenticity and social nuance of the situations they are attempting to model. Health care students, for example, will often face difficult conversations with seriously ill patients during their placement time when in study. Currently, there is an under-preparedness associated with placement shock when students’ previous assumptions and the reality of patient care do not match. VR would seem well suited to preparing students for this reality but only if the simulations capture the complexity and social nuance. As currently there is little consideration of the social and cultural dimensions for developing social VR experiences, this paper proposes a framework for designing such socially oriented VR applications. We case study the framework by designing a social VR application for health care students to prepare for placement.