[DC] Privacy in VR: Empowering Users with Emotional Privacy from Verbal and Non-verbal Behavior of Their Avatars

The next paradigm for social and collaborative VR applications is heavily based on the real time behavior of tracked avatars for rich communication. Industry giants are actively focusing on producing photo-realistic avatars with facial and body movement tracking of real time captured verbal and non-verbal cues. This enables applications to convey the user’s actual emotive expressions and behaviors through a virtual avatar, enabling the exchange of rich communication. However, the capability exposes individualized patterns of users without providing any opportunity to filter out undesired tracking before expressing them in front of a crowd, and thus can expose privacy problems. In order to address the trade-off between rich communication and privacy in VR, my PhD dissertation is focusing on providing rich user behaviors using verbal and non-verbal cues through VR avatars, while also providing a protective layer to eliminate unwanted or unneeded leaking of emotions or movements, and thus providing a more-trusted collaborative VR experience.