As virtual reality (VR) moves beyond entertainment into everyday use, secure user authentication becomes critical, yet passwords remain the dominant mechanism. Entering complex passwords with controllers is slow, error‑prone, and vulnerable to observation, making password managers (PMs) a promising solution, whose usability for VR remains underexplored. As VR users start to rely on new VR-native or traditional managers, we lack understanding on how they select, trust, and interact with these tools. To bridge this gap, we conducted the first interview-based study with 11 users of PMs in VR. Our findings show that while PMs enhance password usability in VR, they do not fully meet VR users' needs, leading them to rely on their own risky security practices. Based on the findings, we recommend that future VR PMs consider tool familiarity, incorporate VR-native, biometric‑enabled password management, and provide simplified, interactive security feedback to further enhance usability, favoring trust and secure practices.
KABLO Emiram;
SHARAFI Avishan;
ARIAS CABARCOS Patricia;
2026-04-21
Association for Computing Machinery
JRC145490
979-8-4007-2281-3 (online),
https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3798346,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC145490,
10.1145/3772363.3798346 (online),
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