Big Buddy: Exploring Child Reactions and Parental Perceptions towards a Simulated Embodied Moderating System for Social Virtual Reality

Children experience new forms of harassment in Social Virtual Reality (VR), often inaccessible to parental oversight. We aimed to understand how an artificial intelligent moderator safeguarding children from harassment in social VR is perceived by children and parents, by introducing "Big Buddy", a Wizard-of-Oz embodied AI-moderator. 43 children (aged 8-16) played a tower-block-construction game in a simulated Social VR classroom where fictitious competitors disrupted their game and, in experimental conditions where present, Big Buddy intervened. We measured children's perceptions after the disruptions, towards Big Buddy, and the moderation actions it took. Children felt significantly less sad and safer when Big Buddy suspended the saboteur. Parents (n=17) noted Big Buddy's usefulness and felt reassured but would remain in the supervision loop. We present the first empirical research of a VR-embodied AI-moderator with children's and parents' perspectives, and propose design directions for embodied AI-moderators in Social VR.