One of the hottest topics in the VR community are the growing incidents of sexual harassments in which, just recently, happened in the game called QuiVR, an Archery Tower Defense game currently available only for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift platforms. The incident was explained in full details by Jordan Belamire in an interview with Medium.
When the news caught the gaming world's attention, several players that have also experienced similar incidents began to spring one by one. It then turned out that sexual harassments in the VR world are not uncommon and it is growing in numbers as you read this article. Alarmed with the impact to its fans and the community, the developers of QuiVR, Jonathan Shenker and Aaron Stanton have made an ingenious idea of modding their own game to prevent these sexual harassments.
When asked about why they are modding the game, one of the developers said: "This had happened in our game; this had been on our watch. We should have prevented this in the first place."
The new mod, or shall we say "Sexual Harassments Countermeasure" is in a form of an in-game "superpower" where players have full control over. This superpower allows any user to complete "dissolve" any other player from his/her field of view; making them invisible and intangible for you. This also takes effect on the other player's perspectives making you invisible to the other user(s) as well.
The superpower mod can easily be turned on and off by the user through a simple hand motion - putting both of their hands together then pulling both of the Vive triggers will activate the mod. So far, the mod has been received quite well by the community and it has been going rounds across the virtual community. Some similar VR games might actually emulate the same approach in order to prevent any sexual harassments to occur in their respective games.
It's great that developers are making ingenious methods to counteract such illicit behaviors. It would be shameful if the same incident will ever recur in the future as sexual harassment is such a sensitive matter to begin with. Added to this is the fact that when you're in the VR world, everything seems to be more "realistic" than what you think it actually is.
