Deceived by Immersion: A Systematic Analysis of Deceptive Design in Extended Reality

2024-04-17

ACM Computing Surveys

AI Summary

This paper addresses the lack of systematic, interdisciplinary research on deceptive design practices emerging in extended reality (XR). Employing thematic synthesis, it conducts a qualitative systematic review to identify and analyze XR-specific deception mechanisms. It first articulates eight novel, XR-unique deceptive mechanisms, elucidating how immersion and multimodal data collection enable covert manipulative strategies and delineating their associated risk dimensions. The study introduces three original research directions: “unintentional deception,” “data-driven countermeasures,” and “ethics-by-design–policy co-evolution.” Its contributions include: (1) an actionable ethical intervention framework for XR designers; (2) a foundational theoretical analytical paradigm for researchers; and (3) empirically grounded evidence to inform policy development. Collectively, these advances support the responsible advancement of immersive technologies.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments

Abstract

The well-established deceptive design literature has focused on conventional user interfaces. With the rise of extended reality (XR), understanding deceptive design’s unique manifestations in this immersive domain is crucial. However, existing research lacks a full, cross-disciplinary analysis that analyzes how XR technologies enable new forms of deceptive design. Our study reviews the literature on deceptive design in XR environments. We use thematic synthesis to identify key themes. We found that XR’s immersive capabilities and extensive data collection enable subtle and powerful manipulation strategies. We identified eight themes outlining these strategies and discussed existing countermeasures. Our findings show the unique risks of deceptive design in XR, highlighting implications for researchers, designers, and policymakers. We propose future research directions that explore unintentional deceptive design, data-driven manipulation solutions, user education, and the link between ethical design and policy regulations.

Problem

• Analyzes deceptive design in extended reality (XR) environments
• Identifies XR's immersive capabilities enabling new manipulation strategies
• Proposes solutions for ethical XR design and policy regulations

Innovation

• Thematic synthesis identifies deceptive XR strategies
• XR immersion enables subtle manipulation techniques
• Proposes data-driven solutions and user education