From the comfort of home: Examining consumer virtual reality use in the home

Abstract

Despite the hype that has driven mass-market consumer virtual reality (VR), research relating to the at-home use of these technologies is underexplored. The contexts, responses, and experiences of people who use VR offer insight into the ways that VR is becoming a domestic technology. Applying methods drawn from digital ethnography, our research asks how participants interpret their use of VR in the home, and how they integrate it into their social, personal, and material contexts. We examine data consisting of interviews, images, and videos from participants (n = 15) across 10 countries to begin to chart the complexities of the real-world conditions of VR. Our findings show that as these participants make efforts to creatively integrate VR into their everyday routines, the enjoyment that they describe is entwined with a variety of difficulties, demonstrating that consumer VR offloads a burden of adaptation onto the people who bring these technologies into their homes.