Meta is debuting new security features for its virtual world, which will allow for more protective space between virtual metaverse avatars.
According to a company blog post Friday (Feb. 4), the Personal Boundary feature in Meta’s virtual reality (VR) platforms Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues puts a four-foot distance between one’s avatar and others.
The Personal Boundary feature will make it so if someone tries to enter the boundary, the virtual world will halt their forward movement.
The user whose space was intruded upon won’t feel it, the blog says, and Meta says it builds on their existing hand harassment measures — where a user’s virtual hands would “disappear” if they got too close to someone.
“We are intentionally rolling out Personal Boundary as always on, by default, because we think this will help to set behavioral norms — and that’s important for a relatively new medium like VR,” the blog says.
The company added that they may explore new controls and user interface (UI) changes in the future, which could include allowing users to customize the side of their Personal Boundary.
Meta says virtual reality “can and should be for everyone,” and the Personal Boundary feature is a way to help people “interact comfortably.”
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority also recently fined Meta 1.5 million pounds ($2 million) for not informing the regulator about key staff leaving the company, which was a violation of its enforcement order.
Read more: CMA Fines Meta $2M for Violating Initial Enforcement Order
The CMA put the order down in June 2020 as part of Meta’s — then Facebook’s — plan to buy Giphy.
PYMNTS wrote that it’s a standard practice to make sure the companies involved in a proposed merger still compete with one another as they would have before. That constituted letting the competition watchdog know if anything happened, such as staffing changes.
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