Novel Approaches for Understanding and Mitigating Emerging New Harms in Immersive and Embodied Virtual Spaces: A Workshop at CHI 2024

Abstract

As online spaces facilitate increasingly immersive and embodied experiences, concerns about how these emerging spaces may amplify and extend existing online harms and even lead to new harms, and how HCI researchers and developers can work to mitigate such harms also grow. Typical examples of these new and understudied forms of harm range from embodied harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) to racist Zoombombing, new AI-powered online attacks such as hate raids on Twitch, and harmful virtual world design to manipulate users. This workshop aims to bring together a set of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners from HCI and adjacent fields to explore further how these new harms continue to shape the current research discourse of online safety, cybersecurity, and immersive and embodied interactions in HCI, and to collectively identify what new technologies and mechanisms can be envisioned, designed, and implemented to better understand and mitigate these harms.