Developing Sociotechnical Solutions to Mitigate New Harms in Immersive and Embodied Virtual Spaces: A Workshop at CHI 2025

Abstract

Mitigating new harms in immersive and embodied virtual spaces (e.g., embodied harassment in social VR, new AI-powered online attacks, and harmful virtual world design to manipulate users) is a critically needed HCI research agenda for achieving safer online environments in the future, which requires cross-disciplinary, community-wide discussion, and collective reflections. Building upon our CHI 2024 workshop on identifying and understanding these new harms, this workshop aims to gather researchers and practitioners from various domains to collectively design and develop concrete and actionable sociotechnical solutions that specifically target new harms in immersive and embodied virtual worlds. This includes but is not limited to the four themes identified in our CHI 2024 workshop: monetizing embodied harms, blurring reality with the online world, platforming perpetrators by investigating their motivations and emotions, and embodied harms specifically targeting children. Through this workshop, we will not only synthesize and map our existing interdisciplinary efforts and challenges in this space but also collaboratively create a roadmap detailing our developed sociotechnical solutions to address these new harms in immersive and embodied virtual spaces as a community.