Hardware

Meta to allow Horizon Worlds users to turn their avatar’s personal safety boundary off

Comment

Image Credits: Meta

After reports that women were already being groped and sexually harassed in Meta’s new VR spaces, Horizon Worlds and Venues, the company formerly known as Facebook last month rolled out a new “Personal Boundary” feature that created a bubble of space with a radius of two virtual feet around each avatar. This prevented avatars from getting within roughly four feet of one another. Today, Meta is customizing this feature by allowing users to optionally turn the setting off, or control when it’s enabled.

Instead of making the boundary default to on for all Horizon Worlds experiences, Meta said today it will allow users to choose whether or not they want the setting enabled for all interactions. Now, VR users will be able to turn their Personal Boundary off, as was the standard prior to the feature’s launch. There is still a small personal boundary to prevent unwanted interactions, the company says — but this was not enough in the past to prevent bad actors from simulating rape in Meta’s virtual worlds, we should note.

Users will also be able to turn the Personal Boundary on for non-Friends only, which would enable the extra safety feature when you’re with people you don’t know, but leave it off when you’re virtually hanging out with people on your friends list. You also can choose to keep the Personal Boundary enabled for all experiences, as before.

However, Meta says it’s adjusting the default setting to keep the Personal Boundary on for non-Friends only, which means it’s dialing back the safety feature a bit. Given that Horizon Worlds is a new social network, people may be friending other users they don’t know in real life after meeting them in the virtual space. That means a user’s friends list may not be quite the same as a list of people the user explicitly trusts. So some caution should still be advised here.

Image Credits: Meta

Meta claims the changes were made based on community feedback after February’s rollout of the Personal Boundary feature. The company believes the new options will make it easier for people to high-five, fist-bump and take selfies with other avatars in Horizon Worlds.

In addition, Meta says the Personal Boundary will default to the more restrictive setting when two people meet for the first time. For example, if one person’s Personal Boundary is off but the other person’s is set to On for Everyone, then the platform will establish a four-foot space between both people. And it says the Personal Boundary will now default to on at roughly four feet for everyone participating in its live events VR experience Horizon Venues.

In its announcement about the changes, Meta acknowledged that developing for VR represents “what are perhaps some of the hardest challenges we’ve tackled in a generation of computing now that we’re no longer limited by fixed viewpoints and traditional flatscreen devices.”

But this statement seems to throw the blame for its earlier failures to protect women in its VR space solely on the fact that building for VR worlds is something new and, therefore, some trial and error will be involved. But had Meta sought the input of more women engineers or gamers to begin with, it’s hard to imagine this topic wouldn’t have come up. After all, sexual assault in virtual spaces is something that’s happened before, repeatedly — including in other virtual reality games, in VR precursors like Second Life, and even in a children’s virtual game on Roblox. It’s unbelievable that the company would not have considered built-in protections when designing a new VR environment. It also shows Facebook’s tendency to design for growth and scale first and user safety second is also carrying over to its new projects, like Horizon Worlds.

The company says it will continue to iterate and make improvements as it learns more about how Personal Boundary impacts the VR experience.

More TechCrunch

Featured Article

What to expect from WWDC 2024: iOS 18, macOS 15 and so much AI

Apple is hoping to make WWDC 2024 memorable as it finally spells out its generative AI plans.

42 mins ago
What to expect from WWDC 2024: iOS 18, macOS 15 and so much AI

We just announced the breakout session winners last week. Now meet the roundtable sessions that really “rounded” out the competition for this year’s Disrupt 2024 audience choice program. With five…

The votes are in: Meet the Disrupt 2024 audience choice roundtable winners

The malicious attack appears to have involved malware transmitted through TikTok’s DMs.

TikTok acknowledges exploit targeting high-profile accounts

It’s unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issues or internet-scale problem.

AI apocalypse? ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all went down at the same time

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at LoanSnap’s woes, Nubank’s and Monzo’s positive milestones, a plethora of fintech fundraises and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest…

A look at LoanSnap’s troubles and which neobanks are having a moment

Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. (CNBC reports that Databricks payed over $1 billion.) According to Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue,…

Databricks acquires Tabular to build a common data lakehouse standard

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…

Worldcoin faces pivotal EU privacy decision within weeks

OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has been down for several users across the globe for the last few hours.

OpenAI fixes the issue that caused ChatGPT outage for several hours

True Fit, the AI-powered size-and-fit personalization tool, has offered its size recommendation solution to thousands of retailers for nearly 20 years. Now, the company is venturing into the generative AI…

True Fit leverages generative AI to help online shoppers find clothes that fit

Audio streaming service TuneIn is teaming up with Discord to bring free live radio to the platform. This is TuneIn’s first collaboration with a social platform and one that is…

Discord and TuneIn partner to bring live radio to the social platform

The early victors in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Just take a look at data-labeling startup Scale AI…

Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang is coming to Disrupt 2024

Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the…

Engineer brothers found Forge to modernize hardware procurement

Raspberry Pi has released a $70 AI extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing, for the Raspberry Pi 5.

Raspberry Pi partners with Hailo for its AI extension kit

When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But…

Stacklet sees demand grow as companies take cloud cost control more seriously

Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake Service aims to remove the repetitive work of managing data lakes.

Fivetran launches a managed data lake service

Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest that they began trying to understand how to use search engines to…

How a couple of former Pinterest search experts caught Biz Stone’s attention

GetWhy helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI.

GetWhy, a market research AI platform that extracts insights from video interviews, raises $34.5M

AI-powered virtual physical therapy platform Sword Health has seen its valuation soar 50% to $3 billion.

Sword Health raises $130 million and its valuation soars to $3 billion

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, along with three general partners, manage $1.5 billion in assets today through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.

WndrCo officially gets into venture capital with fresh $460M across two funds

The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates, and those that facilitate a full-control approach.

Storyblok raises $80M to add more AI to its ‘headless’ CMS aimed at non-technical people

The startup has been pursuing a ground-up redesign of a well-understood technology.

‘Star Wars’ lasers and waterfalls of molten salt: How Xcimer plans to make fusion power happen

Sékr, a startup that offers a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts and campers, is launching a new AI tool for planning road trips. The new tool, called Copilot, is available…

Travel app Sékr can plan your next road trip with its new AI tool

Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights non-profit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…

Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite

Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get…

Samara is accelerating the energy transition in Spain one solar panel at a time

Featured Article

DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges

It’s clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI.

22 hours ago
DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges

The keynote will be focused on Apple’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.

Watch Apple kick off WWDC 2024 right here

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Unfortunately, Boeing’s Starliner launch was delayed yet again, this time due to issues with one of the three redundant computers used by United…

TechCrunch Space: China’s victory

The court ruling said that Fearless Fund’s Strivers Grant likely violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.

An appeals court rules that VC Fearless Fund cannot issue grants to Black women, but the fight continues

Instagram Threads is rolling out the ability for users to signal which sort of posts they wanted to see more or less of by swiping.

You can now customize your For You feed on Threads using swipes