From Barriers to Blueprints: A Critical Systematic Review of Older Adults and Social VR

Conte, Munteanu, and Sapkota conduct a critical systematic review of 85 HCI papers (2017-2024) on older adults and social VR, arguing that the dominant narrative — which frames older adults as deficient users who struggle to adopt VR — is itself a product of flawed research practice rather than a neutral observation. Adapting "resistant reading" from feminist literary theory (Fetterley, 1978) and Feminist HCI, they treat the published corpus as text to be read against the grain: participant quotes and behaviours are extracted as primary evidence independent of the surrounding authorial framing. Using PRISMA-guided search across five databases (ACM, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar), they narrowed 1,847 records to 85 papers (75 empirical), coded researcher discourse into three narrative types (Techno-Solutionism 55.3%, Social Connection 24.7%, Empowerment 18.8%), and extracted 284 instances of "archived resistance" — older-adult testimony that was recorded but reframed through deficit paradigms. The authors build on Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice framework (testimonial and hermeneutical) and Peine & Neven's socio-gerontechnology to argue that HCI on aging commits epistemic violence at an institutional scale, generating a "Vicious Cycle of Deficit-Focused Inquiry" across four dimensions: Activity, Embodiment, Environment, and Accessibility. Their contribution is resistant reading as a meta-analytic method, empirical documentation of institutional epistemic injustice in HCI, and four "Critical Re-Orientations" for design practice.

Across 284 resistance instances, 74.3% span multiple dimensions — revealing that older adults resist VR as an integrated configuration, not as isolated usability failures. Direct VoicedCritique accounts for 43.7% of evidence; ResearcherMisinterpretation (123 instances) clusters heavily in the Activity dimension (39.4% of all misinterpretations), where therapeutic scripts most directly override users' stated preferences. In each dimension a consistent cycle operates: (1) Activity — VR is scripted as therapeutic task; users "just want to hang out"; researchers code the refusal as failure to engage and respond with forced gamification. (2) Embodiment — the aging body is framed as broken; users reject avatars ("puppets," "zombies") and remove headsets for dizziness; researchers code this as graphics limitations and propose hyper-realistic systems. (3) Environment — isolation is framed as a spatial problem "solved" by public mixing; users respond with protective gatekeeping (custom private rooms, avoiding strangers); researchers code this as navigation failure and remove safety barriers. (4) Accessibility — success is defined as solitary use; users reveal reliance on invisible care labour from staff and family; researchers code this as UI friction and simplify interfaces rather than adding support. The authors propose four Critical Re-Orientations: Prescription → Authentic Presence, Prosthesis → Embodied Dignity, Rescue → Permeable Boundaries, and Independence → Interdependence.

This paper is methodologically and politically consequential for accessibility practitioners and researchers working on any technology marketed to disabled or older populations. It names a concrete mechanism — institutional testimonial and hermeneutical injustice — through which user research can produce the very "failed user" it then designs around, and it supplies resistant reading as a transferable method for auditing research corpora on children and technology, disability, and other populations whose testimony is routinely reframed. The four Re-Orientations translate directly into briefs for product teams: stop asking what task a user can perform; start asking how the space supports connection; treat headset removal as valid testimony, not a hardware problem; design for the user-and-carer assemblage rather than the mythic independent user. Limitations include reliance on English-language peer-reviewed literature, under-representation of successful/positive experiences (resistance-focused lens), and the WEIRD skew of the primary corpus, which means the resistance of globally excluded older adults remains silent even in this critique.