Introducing our new space bubble

Today we’re announcing our latest tool to provide you with more control over your experience in AltspaceVR: a space bubble. The space bubble creates a close barrier around your avatar to prevent others from entering your personal space. VR makes it possible to feel incredibly present with other people, and we have seen the need for the ability to choose how closely others can approach you. Our latest feature helps bring the same social standards we have in real life into our virtual world.

We are starting with a limited release in our more popular spaces. Support for space bubble in events will be happening later. Look for spaces with a space bubble logo to experience the new feature.You’ll find them under the Home menu in the Recommended section.

How it works
You can easily turn your space bubble on and off depending on your comfort level by clicking the space bubble icon on the bottom right of your home icon. If the bubble is active, users can approach up to about a foot away before their hands and bodies disappear from your view. This allows others to get close without encroaching on your personal space.

And you can still fist bump, high five and air kiss with friends; you both turn off the space bubble. By default, the personal space bubble is active.

Harassment has no place in AltspaceVR and we try to be quick to address behavior that breaks our community standards. This feature joins a set of tools that we’ve implemented to combat trolling. First, there is a living-breathing person inside AltspaceVR to answer your questions and support you — 24 hours a day, and you can report at altvr.com/report-abuse. Users can also mute and block another user by clicking a button in the bad actor’s name-tag. When a user clicks the block button, the bad actor is removed from their experience. The bad actor will no longer see or hear the user.

We’ll continue to iterate on these features to give you the best experience. We’ve found that with fun things to do and tools to support a good interaction, cool people meet and have a fantastic social experience in VR. Thank you for your help in making this community fun, ground-breaking, and welcoming to everyone.