Acceptance of an Augmented Society: Initial Explorations into the Acceptability of Augmenting Real World Locations

2025-02-10

AI Summary

This study investigates public acceptance of and normative expectations regarding augmented reality (AR) content deployment in sensitive locations—including religious sites, cultural heritage areas, and residential neighborhoods. Employing a custom-built AR mobile application, the research conducted field experiments featuring context-aware content publishing interfaces, complemented by a mixed-methods approach (structured surveys and in-depth interviews). It provides the first empirical evidence identifying three core user demands: location sensitivity, contextual appropriateness of AR content, and cross-platform regulatory consistency. Results indicate strong user support for access-controlled AR publishing at religious and cultural sites; a clear expectation that AR content must align with local environmental and sociocultural contexts; and advocacy for harmonizing AR governance with existing social media regulation frameworks. The study contributes the first empirically grounded, place-sensitive governance framework for spatial ethics and policy development in AR.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Privacy & Security
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) will enable individuals to share and experience content augmented at real world locations with ease. But what protections and restrictions should be in place? Should, for example, anyone be able to post any content they wish at a place of religious or cultural significance? We developed a smartphone app to give individuals hands-on experience posting and sharing AR content. After using our app, we investigated their attitudes towards posting different types of AR content (of an artistic, protest, social, informative, and commercial nature) in a variety of locations (cultural sites, religious sites, residential areas, public spaces, government buildings, and tourist points of interests). Our results show individuals expect restrictions to be in place to control who can post AR content at some locations, in particular those of religious and cultural significance. We also report individuals prefer augmentations to fit contextually within the environment they are posted, and expect the posting and sharing of AR content to adhere to the same regulations/legislation as social media platforms.

Problem

• AR content posting restrictions
• Contextual fit of AR augmentations
• Regulations similar to social media

Innovation

• Developed smartphone AR app
• Investigated AR content attitudes
• Expected contextual AR restrictions