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

Immersive and embodied virtual spaces are increasingly prevalent. Such environments are also generally beneficial, facilitating connection with others and allowing for novel experiences. However, the paradigm shifts introduced by such environments (e.g., immersion, embodiment, or technological advancements) can also lead to new harms for users, such as embodied harassment in social VR, racist Zoombombing, human-bot coordinated hate raids in live streaming, harmful user-generated virtual world design, and new types of perceptual manipulations leveraging the core abilities of XR technology to create illusions to the user.

In this workshop, we want to bring together a set of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners from HCI and adjacent fields to better understand these new harms and develop novel strategies to mitigate them. We invite interested researchers and practitioners to submit a short position statement (2 pages maximum in CHI submission format) with this form by March 8, 2024. Submissions are *NOT* anonymized. Please include the name of the author(s) on the submission.

Please describe why you are interested in the area, which work they have already done, and if they are interested in specific topics related to the workshop, including but not limited to:

• Identifying various forms of new online harms across different immersive and embodied virtual spaces

• Creating frameworks, taxonomies, and definitions to describe these new online harms

• Explaining potential sociotechnical causes of these new online harms

• Investigating how harms in immersive and embodied spaces can also be translated to physical harms in the offline world

• Understanding various stakeholders' perspectives when encountering these new harms in immersive and embodied virtual spaces

• Unpacking how these new online harms may especially damage marginalized technology users' online experiences

• Building a fundamental understanding of how traditionally considered positive metrics of immersive online experiences such as presence and embodiment might amplify the negative impact of these new online harms

• Synthesizing existing strategies and recommendations to deal with these new online harms

• Articulating coping approaches for managing exposure to harms that can be integrated into system designs

• Evaluating how, if at all, existing harm mitigation strategies (e.g., moderation) can or cannot be used to mitigate these new harms in immersive and embodied online spaces

• Identifying both opportunities and risks of leveraging AI to detect and mitigate these new online harms

• Describing how AI can be used to create new and more severe forms of online harm in immersive and embodied virtual spaces rather than mitigating harms

• Brainstorming alternative novel approaches to understand and mitigate new online harms in immersive and embodied online spaces

We will accept submissions in the scope of the workshop in which participants have prior expertise. The workshop will be organized as a hybrid event at CHI 2024. One participant from each submission must register for the workshop and at least one day of the CHI conference. All submissions will be published on the workshop website and a collection of workshop papers.

This hybrid, one-day workshop will take place on Saturday, May 11, 2024 in Room 306A during CHI 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

If you have any questions regarding this workshop, please contact Dr. Guo Freeman <guof@clemson.edu>.