Institute For The Future

Negotiating trust and what's real in the new world of Social VR

From thinking about data in three dimensions to re-inventing audience experience, what can we learn about navigating embodied presence?

Since its completion in 2019, this research has been exclusively available to IFTF Vantage partners, inspiring strategic foresight teams and R&D departments in the both public and private sectors to pursue their own deep dives into this what this new media can offer.

Now it is your turn to explore questions like:

Is social VR the next social media?

How is it different from older forms of communication, and from solo VR experiences?

Learn from what IFTF found while studying what people are doing when they are together in Virtual Reality, and what these early behaviors suggest about the future of work, communication, retail, and more. Research directors Lyn Jeffery and Toshi Hoo share their findings in this in-depth research report.

On a handful of platforms around the world in 2018, a small group of pioneers were hanging out in 3D environments in 3D bodies, willing to endure technical challenges, limited content, and lack of standard practices and etiquette to be the first to inhabit and explore new shared virtual worlds.

IFTF spent eight months exploring their environments, communities, and practices. Their experiments provide early signals that point to a future where we each have a personal digital body, and content can be experienced in full 3D space. This will have profound implications for how we socialize, learn, work, engage with content, and take care of ourselves.

This study contains 10 Leading-Edge Behaviors: emerging and innovative user practices likely to play out more broadly over the next few years. Leading-edge Behaviors inspire and inform new products, experience and service ideas, and reveal emerging opportunities and implications.

Leading-Edge Behaviors are created through a blend of expert interviews, observational and ethnographic research, and horizon scanning with people pushing the edges of new applications, devices, and platforms.

Explore full report »

Interested in engaging with early research exclusively available to IFTF Vantage partners?

Sean Ness | [email protected] | 650-233-9517