What is Meta’s ‘Personal Boundary’ and how does it prevent virtual groping

TL;DR Breakdown:

• Meta recently introduced Personal Boundary, the latest improvement to its metaverse spaces.
• The new feature aims to prevent sexual harassment in the virtual world. 
• It creates a distance between avatars to prevent intrusion.   

Meta, the parent company of social media giant Facebook, is progressively improving its metaverse-style virtual world.

In October, the company rebranded to “Meta” to better reflect its commitment to building a metaverse, which the founder Mark Zuckerberg described as a world where there’s “more to build.” Since then, Meta has invested up to $10 billion and hired more workforce to drive for developments and improvements in its virtual world, with the newest being “Personal Boundary.” 

What’s Personal Boundary

Personal Boundary comes as an extra layer of security or a user-improvement feature for everyone in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues – two offsprings from the company’s metaverse social platform known as “Horizon.”

What this new feature does is to prevent avatars in both virtual worlds from colliding and causing unwanted interaction. Personal Boundary will automatically create an almost four-foot space between avatars and will pause any further movement upon reaching the boundaries. 

Personal Boundary is designed to run on default, meaning the four-door distance between will always be on. Besides preventing intrusion, Meta said the new function can help ensure behavioral norms, which is “important for a relatively new medium like VR.”

Why Personal Boundary?

The announcement on the boundary feature, which is currently available for Horizon Venues and Horizon Worlds, comes some months after the controversies on how Meta’s virtual reality space could allow sexual harassment. 

In December, one of Horizon’s beta testers complained about being sexually harassed (virtually groped) by a stranger. “Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behavior which made me feel isolated in the Plaza,” the beta-tester wrote. 

Perhaps, Personal Boundary is Meta’s response to addressing this issue of sexual harassment for Horizon, and it could be adopted to control such cases in other metaverse spaces. 

“We are intentionally rolling out Personal Boundary as always on, by default, because we think this will help to set behavioral norms—and that’s important for a relatively new medium like VR,” Meta wrote.

In the future, Meta will grant users the ability to control the size of their boundaries, including new controls and UI changes for a better user experience.