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Shady Mansour, Verena Winterhalter, Florian Alt, Viktorija Paneva
Are You Onboard? Exploring Experiential Privacy Onboarding in Virtual Reality
In VRST '26: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology. November 7, 2026. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3822517.3848675 (bib)

VR applications increasingly rely on sensors such as hand tracking, eye tracking, and microphones, yet users are often asked to grant sensor access before experiencing how these permissions affect interaction. This paper examines privacy onboarding as a pre-consent intervention that helps users reason about the consequences of permissions in VR. We developed an interactive onboarding prototype for a productivity scenario in which users previewed the functional effects of permission decisions before encountering standard VR permission dialogs. In a between-subjects study (N=40), we found that onboarding increased participants' perceived ability to continue using the system after refusing permissions, highlighting the importance of making refusal a visible and supported path. Interview findings further showed that onboarding shifted consent reasoning from inference based on familiar permission conventions toward demonstrated trade-offs between data access and functionality. While onboarding did not significantly affect task completion time, self-reported understanding, or overall permission-granting rates, the findings suggest that privacy onboarding can support more deliberate consent reasoning by making permission consequences more experiential. We discuss implications for designing VR consent experiences that support autonomy, consequence understanding, and ongoing consent management.