Abstract
AbstractExtended reality (XR) technologies have experienced cycles of development—“summers” and “winters”—for decades, but their overall trajectory is one of increasing uptake. In recent years, immersive extended reality (IXR) applications, a kind of XR that encompasses immersive virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) environments, have become especially prevalent. The European Union (EU) is exploring regulating this type of technology, and this article seeks to support this endeavor. It outlines safety and privacy harms associated with IXR, analyzes to what extent the existing EU framework for digital governance—including the General Data Protection Regulation, Product Safety Legislation, ePrivacy Directive, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, and AI Act—addresses these harms, and offers some recommendations to EU legislators on how to fill regulatory gaps and improve current approaches to the governance of IXR.
Funder
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference183 articles.
1. Abraham, M., Saeghe, P., Mcgill, M., & Khamis, M. (2022). Implications of XR on privacy, security and behaviour: Insights from experts. In Nordic human-computer interaction conference, 1–12. NordiCHI ’22. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3546691
2. Access Age-Restricted Content & Features. (n.d.). Google Account Help. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/10071085?visit_id=638118830802650744-3756593632&p=age-verify&rd=1
3. Aguiar, L., Peukert, C., Schäfer, M., & Ullrich, H. (2022). Facebook shadow profiles. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.04131
4. Alsop, T. 2022. Topic: XR: AR, VR, and the metaverse. Statista. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/topics/6072/extended-reality-xr/
5. Ang, S., & Quarles, J. (2023). Reduction of cybersickness in head mounted displays use: A systematic review and taxonomy of current strategies. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 4, 1027552. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2023.1027552