A new study from University of Iowa researchers pinpoints important ethical considerations for extended reality technology use by children.

Extended reality (XR) technologies use headsets to immerse participants in virtual or augmented realities. With the technologies rapidly developing and expanding into the children’s market, Juan Pablo Hourcade, professor and director of graduate studies for the interdisciplinary graduate program in informatics, sought to devise ethical perspectives for the shift. 

To do so, he recruited 23 adults who frequently interacted with children through their roles as parents, teachers, and health care professionals. Hourcade particularly aimed to assess the ethical perspectives of adults who lived or worked with children in rural settings. 

The adults participated in multiple one-hour sessions, taking and discussing a questionnaire about parental attitudes toward children’s technologies, experiencing XR technologies, and considering scenarios of children’s XR technology use.

Hourcade’s team identified common concepts brought up by participants during the sessions. He then used these concepts to analytically reveal six ethical dimensions of XR technology use by children: privacy and safety; managing content; balancing XR and reality; developmental, physical, and behavioral impacts; broad concerns for emerging technology; and contextual considerations.

For instance, under the privacy and safety dimension, adults were wary that the technologies can collect and store private information, such as a map of a child’s bedroom where the devices are likely to be commonly used. Under the balancing XR and reality dimension, there was concern that children’s face-to-face social interactions would be supplanted by virtual means.

The context was the underlying factor for when adults saw XR technologies as beneficial — for example, if the technologies could provide rural children access to museum exhibits or medical resources. Hourcade says he believes this focus on context could extend to ethical principles surrounding generative artificial intelligence. 

“It is likely that, in the end, a similar rule of thumb to the one we identified for XR will apply to generative artificial intelligence,” Hourcade says. “This rule would be something along the lines of supporting beneficial experiences that would otherwise not be reasonably available.”

The study, “Understanding Adult Stakeholder Perspectives on the Ethics of Extended Reality Technologies with a Focus on Young Children and Children in Rural Areas,” was published online for the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2024 Interaction Design and Children conference, where it won the award for Best Paper.

Other study authors include Flannery Currin, Summer Schmuecker, and Delaney Norris from the University of Iowa. The study is part of a larger initiative with the goal of developing ethical guidelines for conducting XR research with children.

The study was funded by an unrestricted gift from Reality Labs Research.