  The boom of commercial social virtual reality (VR) platforms in recent years
has signaled the growth and wide-spread adoption of consumer VR. Social VR
platforms draw aspects from traditional 2D virtual worlds where users engage in
various immersive experiences, interactive activities, and choices in
avatar-based representation. However, social VR also demonstrates specific
nuances that extend traditional 2D virtual worlds and other online social
spaces, such as full/partial body tracked avatars, experiencing mundane
everyday activities in a new way (e.g., sleeping), and an immersive means to
explore new and complex identities. The growing popularity has signaled
interest and investment from top technology companies who each have their own
social VR platforms. Thus far, social VR has become an emerging research space,
mainly focusing on design strategies, communication and interaction modalities,
nuanced activities, self-presentation, harassment, privacy, and
self-disclosure. These recent works suggest that many questions still remain in
social VR scholarship regarding how to ethically conduct research on these
sites and which research areas require additional attention. Therefore, in this
paper, we provide an overview of modern Social VR, critically review current
scholarship in the area, raise ethical considerations for conducting research
on these sites, and highlight unexplored areas.
