XR Horizons: Unravelling Multi-User Interaction, Multisensory Experiences, and Ethical Considerations in the Realm of Spatial Computing

Project period
January 2024 – December 2025

Objective
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 abusive behaviour and significantly neglected gender differences XR experiences. Moreover, XR technologies present several ethical issues, e.g., technology’s privacy and security. Hence, the considerations of XR privacy and the ethical implications surrounding (unintentional) participation emerge as subjects of public concern within this project.

The project objectives are:

• 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.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The researchers in the team represent the KTH School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Digital Systems Division.