"We Care More About What It Does": Priorities and Responsibilities in VR for Children and Families

Families make key decisions about whether and how Virtual Reality (VR) enters children's lives, but their priorities rarely shape the research agendas and accountability structures that guide what is studied and built. We examine children's and families' views on (1) which knowledge is most needed to support decisions about children's home VR use, (2) which advances, tools, and content should be prioritized, and (3) which actors they see as responsible for addressing these priorities. We first conducted a secondary analysis of prior interviews with children and guardians to distill a structured set of family-perceived alternatives for home VR use. We then engaged 46 child-involved groups (84 children, 40 guardians) to collaboratively prioritize the perceived importance of these alternatives and assign responsibility to different actors. We found that families prioritized knowledge about VR's effects on brain development and behavior as the most needed, viewing it as the underlying mechanisms with downstream consequences for other effects. They treated safety monitoring as a prerequisite that should not depend solely on parental control, and ranked safety above affordability, comfort, and visual realism. This work contributes to the VR community by offering a children- and family-informed VR research agenda, along with insights into who families believe should be responsible for addressing these priorities.