Multi-User, Multi Sensory Interactions & Ethics in Spatial Computing

Extended Reality (XR) technologies offer remote colocated experiences, realistic interactions, and the potential for a climate-neutral society. However, understanding their impact on cultural and social behaviours, as well as addressing ethics, privacy, and security concerns, is crucial for both the public and industry. One of the major limitations of the current extended reality (XR) technology is its focus on single-user experience, mainly when other users are physically co-present. Previous criticism has also highlighted that VR experiences were primarily designed for the white, Western, male sensorial body, leading to biased and non-inclusive strategies. This default design has caused harm to female bodies and contributed to abusive behavioural, and significantly neglected gender differences XR experiences. Moreover, XR technologies present several ethical, privacy and security issues. Hence, the considerations of XR privacy and the ethical implications surrounding (unintentional) participation emerge as subjects of public concern within this project.

This project aims to push the boundaries and expand XR interaction by introducing multi-user environments, enriching haptic feedback, and enabling outdoor exploration. By pushing these boundaries, we will explore the ethical implications for designing XR experiences where users can experience XR together, touch and feel virtual objects, and possibly go beyond indoor interaction. To achieve this, we will create diverse XR experiences and evaluate them with users in controlled experiments to better understand their multisensory capabilities. By exposing them to various XR environments under different social (single vs. multi-user), perceptual (no haptic vs. haptic), and environmental (indoor vs. outdoor) conditions, we will create a starting point for deep reflections in group workshops on how we interact with XR technology, how multisensory XR experiences affect our perception, and what ethical considerations should be followed to create experiences to include multiple user interaction.

Project objectives:

• To understand the relationship between the use of extended reality technologies and the requirements of society in terms of ethics, security, trustworthiness and inclusivity from a society-centric perspective.
• To explore users’ multisensory experiences using haptic feedback with a set of indoor and outdoor extended reality contexts as active and passive users.
• To derive a set of ethical guidelines based on controlled empirical evaluations with the aforementioned set of experiences and users’ reflections on them.